Designer wish list?

Designer wish list?

• modulus

  Doriak,
  
  This is great feadback, and thanks for taking the time to post it.  I'll try to address what is currently supported below.  For the areas we don't currently support, be assured that I'll bring your feedback back to the team to consider for future releases.
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  1. Ability to drag-and-drop "comment" activities (like the 'annotation' shape in Visio) that can be visually associated with an activity, but do not have relevance during runtime.

  
  
  Although there currently are not any out-of-box activities that support this, with the freeform designer framework in Beta2, you should be able to create an annotation activity.  This would make a good exercise or demo once Beta2 is released :-)
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  2. The ability to change the size of the activities in the designer so that the text in the activity can be read, especially when you have long names and the activity is collapsed.

  
  
  Although for standard activities, the activity are wrapped, but the activities themselves cannot be resized.  The State activity and other FreeForm activities, however, can be resized to support arbitrarily long names.
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  3. The ability to enter a free text on the activity as a "title" of the activity. What I mean is following: Today, the only visual text I can see on an activity is the "ID". however, the name has to be a name for coding (i.e "LoadQuarterlySalesReport"). However, when presenting the flow, I would prefer to title that activity "Load Quarterly Sales Report").

  
  
  We currently don't support entering text in a free-form manner on the activity itself, although I agree that this would be very useful.  As to customizing the activity title, the description of the activity is currently also reflected in the tooltip when you hover over the activity.  You could also create a custom designer that displayed the description instead of the ID.
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  4. The ability to associate a different custom image (jpg, gif) to the activities (I am not sure whether the "Theme" feature is for that purpose ).

  
  
  A custom activity designer can choose to draw the activity in any manner it chooses, and so you could choose to draw an associated image if desired. 
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  5. The ability to enter a different title to the workflow itself (besides "Sequential Workflow"), and to have a "info box" associated with the box that could be used for entering info on the workflow (purpose, author, version, etc).

  
  
  We are aware of the workflow title issue, and I could see how exposing additional workflow metadata could be beneficial.  Currently, you could also create your own workflow that derives from one of the standard ones, and adds additional properties to hold this metadata.
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  6. The ability to separate one workflow with many activities in smaller units so that it can be separated in different "pages", but all being part of the same workflow. This would require the ability to have "linking" capabilities from an activity 'Z' in page 1 with activity 'A' in page 2 of the workflow.

  
  
  This is an interesting suggestion; I haven't though of splitting the workflow view onto multiple pages.  I would wonder, however, if this would really be more usable than displaying the workflow on a single designer surface and being able to zoom in and out on the parts you need.  Thoughts
  
  

  Doriak wrote:

  7. And finally, the ability to copy the graphical representation of the workflow to a Word doc. But, as I understand this will be part of Beta 2.

  
  
  Yup, this will be part of Beta2. 
  
  Thanks again, Doriak, and all - we love hearing what you like, don't like, ideas, suggestions - help us make WF better!
  
  Thanks,
  Arjun
  
  
  

• Tao Ma - MSFT

  I think some of these suggestions are really interesting. I particularly like Number 2. It actually could be implemented in a simple way, but having all activities have two different things: An ID (which is the name you currently give to it) and a Descriptive name, and have the second one be the one displayed in the designer.
  
  Anyway, the one thing I would really, really like is for it to be faster. For any even remotely complex workflow, the designer is really, really slow, and sometimes selecting an activity (let alone collapsing a scope) will hang the designer for seconds at a time with the CPU pegged at 100%. It pretty much kills any productivity you might have with it...
  
  
  

• branaugh

  Hi Chetan,
  
  My machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000 (Pentium M - 2GHz with 2GB of RAM). That said, I usually run it in Virtual PC 2004 in virtual machines with at least 768 to 1GB of RAM, but it really isn't any faster than on the machine I used before this one (512MB RAM, Pentium M 1.6GHz).
  
  Now, I'm not talking about really complex workflows. I'm talking about simple things like, say, 10-15 activities, with about 4 of them being composite activities, but even less than that performance drastically sucks. Projects are also simple, containing usually not more than 2 or 3 workflows, and about 4 or 5 projects per solution, and this is with a single VS instance open.
  
  If you need me to trace anything specific, let me know and I'll try to get you as much information as possible. From my personal, very subjective experience, these are the areas that seem to be the slowest:
  
  1- Selecting activities: Selecting an activity and having it's properties appear in the Properties Window in VS can sometimes take up to 1 or 2 seconds. There is a very noticeable delay in this to the user. In fact, try this: Just start selecting activities randomly one after the other, and you'll see that VS just pegs the cpu on the machine.
  
  2- Collapsing and restoring composite activities: There can be a significant delay here. Sometimes I click on an activity three or four times because it doesn't seem to do anything, which only makes the problem worse, of course, it's just that sometimes the delay between the mouse click and the activity collapsing/restoring is so large that you think you didn't click it correctly :(
  
  
  
  
  

• Audrey N. T.

  Thanks Tomas.

  We have fixed some of the perf issues after beta 2 was release. You should notice better performance in the next (RTM) release.

  Thanks,

  Chethan

  
  

• Alex Eyre

  Doriak,
  
  Instead of using multiple pages to model the sub-processes, I would instead suggest to model the subprocesses as encapsulated custom activities, and then drop them into the parent workflow.  By doing things that way, you really are designing each sub-proc on a separate 'page'.
  
  Arjun
  

• Michpre

  "
  

  Doriak wrote:

  6. The ability to separate one workflow with many activities in smaller units so that it can be separated in different "pages", but all being part of the same workflow. This would require the ability to have "linking" capabilities from an activity 'Z' in page 1 with activity 'A' in page 2 of the workflow.

  
  
  This is an interesting suggestion; I haven't though of splitting the workflow view onto multiple pages.  I would wonder, however, if this would really be more usable than displaying the workflow on a single designer surface and being able to zoom in and out on the parts you need.  Thoughts "
  
  Arjun and Ramjapruba,
  
  Thanks for your answers. As for the question on my point 6 (separating a workflow in pages) here is the situation: I have a workflow that has sequential activities for initiation and formatting purposes . This is a long series of steps until I have an If-Else activity that has 3 different outcomes ("Subproc1", "subproc2" and "subproc3"). Each one of these are subprocs will require additional complex sequences.
  
  The situation we have is that when I am discussing/designing the process with other team members, people tend to focus on one subprocess at the time. We find ourselves moving around the big flow, collapsing a group, reopening it, and moving around the surface.
  
  Instead, we wonder if it would be better to have a "LINK TO PAGE" activity for those 3 boxes replacing those 3 big flows. In that way, we have the "Main"-process and 3 "subproc" pages. This would be easier to handle/discuss for the type of scenarios I am mentioning. It is the equivalent to the way we divide logically code with Main procedure and sub-procedures.
  
  And you have a similar visual concept for state machine flows where the state transitions are in one page, and the event-handlers are in different "pages". So, the thought would be, why not to extend it to the sequential workflow.
  
  Ramrajprabu,
  I will be waiting for the custom activity designers you mention ;)
  
  Doriak
  
  
  

• technoTABLET

  Hi,

  I am using the Workflow Desinger Control ( Designer Rehosting sample posted in MSDN) to show workflow activities at run time. this designer will allow end users to drag/drop set of activities onto the desinger and created workflow on their own.

  Requirement: My requirement is to define custom state actvitiy, and state activity height should be reduced and i also want to change the icons of the state activity and underlying eventDrivenActivity. I couldnot find any public "StateActivityDesinger" class similar to "SequentialActivityDesigner" class.

  Is there any way i can reduce the height of a custom state activity

  Thanks!

  Sreeniavs Kairi

  
  

• Andy Lowen

  most of what you wish for is present in the FreeformActivityDesigner that will be a party of WWF Beta2. I'll start posting interesting custom activity designers once beta2 is released :)
  
  

• bisigreat

  Here is a sample about using FreeFormActivityDesigner

  http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=279092&SiteID=1

  
  
  

• SHARANU

  Chethan wrote:

  We have fixed some of the perf issues after beta 2 was release. You should notice better performance in the next (RTM) release.

  
  
  Thanks Chethan, that is excellent news!
  
  
  

• DanLeg

  Hi Tomas,

  We are working on improving the performance of the designer. Can you help me with the following:

  1. What is your machine configuration - amount of RAM, type of processor

  2. Roughly how many activities are there in your workflow How many composite activities

  3. Roughly how many project items are there in the project and number of projects in the solution

  4. Did you have multiple instances of visual studio open

  5. Would you be willing to share your workflow with us

  Thanks,

  Chethan

  
  
• Designer wish list?