SgDotNet

If you like the photosynth, please vote. Thanks!

kitkai — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:01:00 GMT

Hi all, Together with two other friends, Tan Chee and Alvin Lau, we formed a team and took part in Photo360 , a photosynth contest organised by Microsoft Singapore. There are two ways to win, one is the best synth, while the other is the most popular synth. If you like the synth we have done, please help by voting. Thanks! The area we synth is the Kranji War Memorial. Its a challenging place to synth, as the graves makes the place repeating, and requires lots of details for PhotoSynth to successfully...(read more)

Follow-up from March UG Meeting Silverlight 4 Talk

MaungMaung — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:06:36 GMT

Thanks for spending the evening with us at the UG gathering to learn more about Silverlight 4 and Bing Map capabilities. As promised during the talk, here I am sharing the resources to get you up to speed with developing the line of business application using Silverlight 4.

Get the latest Silverlight 4 runtime and tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC, Expression Blend 4 Beta, and the Control Toolkit from the below site. You can also find many links to a series of videos, guides and documentation on Silverlight 4.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/

Here is the link to the “must-try” Silverlight 4 Line of Business Application Development Hands-on Lab - comprehensive and 108 pages step-by-step guide, published by Swiss DPE team.

http://blogs.msdn.com/swiss_dpe_team/archive/2010/01/19/hands-on-lab-silverlight-4-line-of-business-application-using-wcf-ria-services.aspx

You probably have heard from MIX10 that Silverlight is now supported on Windows Phone 7 Series; in fact, it is the de-facto development platform for the next generation of smart device applications. Find out more about Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 Series here. http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7-series/

Silverlight Rough Cut Editor

MaungMaung — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:50:39 GMT

Do you want to empower your editorial and creative teams to speed up the process of content creation by assembling rough cuts before passing them on to final post-production?

Do you need to be able to produce highlights of live events in near real-time?

Do you need to simply replace ads for redistribution of content through a different channel, or simply insert markers, comments and custom meta-data for better coordination between production and post-production teams, broadcasters in specific, and media organizations?

Now, you can do that at ease with the newly released, cross-platform, web-based, open-source, Microsoft Silverlight Rough Cut Editor (RCE)!

The Microsoft Silverlight Rough Cut Editor has the following capabilities:

Assemble & edit video, audio, images and XAML overlays with time code accurate control.
Search & filtering capabilities
- Can be integrated with existing DAM systems
Clip trimming (Mark In/ Mark Out)
Edge clip trimming on Timeline
Comments insertion
Ad Opportunities insertions
Markers insertions
Easy to use user interface
- Three skins to choose from
- Ability to customize look and feel
Titles (lower third titles, title cards or simple credits)
Output generation
- XML format
- Can be integrated with encoding systems
Assets Metadata Display
- Customizable metadata to accommodate existing customer metadata
Load/Save projects.
Support for VOD/Live true HD smooth streaming content
- Slow Motion, Fast Forward, Rewind, Frame by Frame
Supports multiple audio tracks
Standard Player Controls
- Pay, Pause, Stop, Rewind, Forward
- Move to Start, Move to End.
- Frame Forward / Frame Backward
Common Timeline Operations
- Split, Mark In / Mark Out, Undo / Redo, Frame-by-Frame
Extensible architecture allows to
- Add new features
- Remove existing features.
- Replace out of the box services with custom implementations

Here is a sample screenshot of what a Rough Cut Editor looks like.

If you want to deploy the Microsoft Silverlight Rough Cut Editor with your customization of look and feel, integrate it with your own infrastructure such as DAM or Encoding systems, or even extend it to meet other custom requirements, the binaries, source code, and documentation are in the process to be published to http://rce.codeplex.com/ and http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RCE.

March UG Meeting

microlau — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:22:00 GMT

March UG meeting is held on 16 th March 2010 (Tuesday, not Thursday) , at Level 22 CF15, NTUC Building from 1845 – late. Light Refreshments will be served before the session. Peep into Bing Maps Alex Goh, Web Evangelist, Microsoft Singapore 1900 – 2000 Take a tour of the upcoming features of Bing Maps such as StreetSide and augmented reality. Also dive into the Bing Maps Silverlight control to see how easy it is to build your own Bing Map application Developing Business Applications with...(read more)

Pex & Moles

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:21:17 GMT

I know this exactly sounds like an upcoming 3D animation movie title. ~~Sadly~~ Gladly, no, it is not!

Pex and Moles are two new Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools, which were released from Microsoft Research, to help you with unit testing .NET applications.

Pex automatically generates test suites with high code coverage. Right from the Visual Studio code editor, Pex finds interesting input-output values of your methods, which you can save as a small test suite with high code coverage. Microsoft Pex is a Visual Studio add-in for testing .NET Framework applications.

Moles allows you to replace any .NET method with a delegate. Moles supports unit testing by providing isolation by way of detours and stubs. Because Moles works at the method level, it offers an alternative to mocking when the target API does not support it. SharePoint is a popular example of an API that benefits from isolation, but does not directly support mocking. Moles can also be used for fault injection, as it makes it easy to inject arbitrary behavior on your code under test.

Pex is available for commercial use for MSDN subscribers. The Pex installer includes Moles. Moles is also available separately for commercial use without requiring an MSDN subscription. In addition, a version of Pex is available for academic and non-commercial use. Here is the link to the download page- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/downloads.aspx. You can read more about the tools at the following sites.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please use the Pex & Moles forums at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/pex/threads/.

Hooray... one more added MSDN Subscription benefit!

Get Wondershare Office Recovery v1.5 free while stocks last

darenhan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:18:00 GMT

Wondershare Office Recovery, from Wondershare Software, is a new powerful office recovery tool specially designed for recovering office files and PDF files lost caused by accidental deletion, formatted, virus infection, bad sectors, misuse of partition tools and so forth, allowing users to restore variety of office files formats, including DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, PST, DBX, ACCDB, MPP, PUB, ONE, XSN and PDF files.

Now, there is a chance to get a free copy of Wondershare Office Recovery 1.5.

Just go to the link below and

http://www.data-recovery-utilities.com/office-recovery/get-keycode.html

Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 free updates for 1 year for Mac / PC.

darenhan — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:39:00 GMT

Step one:

Go to this link and download the version for PC or Mac on the right hand side - top.

http://shop.trendmicro.com/iomega/en/?sn=f9bj26006x

Step two:

Install the trial but when the installation finishes, you can register your email and you get 1 year free updates as well as subscription.

Enjoy!

After server security patches, the sharing folder permissions disappears. Here is a quick fix.

darenhan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:29:00 GMT

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=125996

To save only the existing share names and their permissions on Windows follow these steps.

Note This procedure applies only to NetBIOS shares and not to Macintosh volumes.

On the existing Windows installation that contains the share names and permissions that you want to save, start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
From the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE subtree, go to the following key:
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares
Save or export the registry key.
- For Windows NT and Windows 2000, click Save Key on the Registry menu.
- For Windows Server 2003, click Export on the File menu.
Type a new file name (a file extension is not necessary), and then save the file to a floppy disk.
Reinstall Windows.
Run Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
From the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE subtree, go to the following key:
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares
Restore or import the registry key.
- For Windows NT and Windows 2000, click Restore on the Registry menu.
- For Windows Server 2003, click Import on the File menu.
Type the path and file name of the file that you saved in steps 3 and 4.

Caution This step overrides the shares that already exist on the Windows computer with the share names and permissions that exist in the file you are restoring. You are warned about this before you restore the key.
Restart the server.

Note After you complete this procedure, if you decide that you should not have restored the Shares key, restart the computer and press the SPACEBAR to use the last known good configuration. After you restore the shares key, the shares can be used by network clients. If you run the net shares command on the server, the server displays the shares; however, File Manager does not display the shares. To make File Manager aware of the newly restored shares, create any new share on the server. File Manager displays all of the other shares after you restart the server or stop and restart the Server service.

In Windows NT 3.5, if you click Stop Sharing in File Manager, the restored shares are still displayed, but they are dimmed.

Only permissions for domain users are restored. If a local user was created in the previous Windows NT installation, that local user's unique security identifier (SID) is lost. NTFS permissions on folders and files are not affected when you save and restore the shares key.

Note: This article does not apply to Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2.

Mobile is Dead – Long Live Windows Phone!

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:23:00 GMT

Happy Lunar New Year to all!

Have you been enjoying your holidays? You might have missed out the great news of Microsoft’s next-generation Windows Phone – Windows Phone 7 Series. Yes, that’s correct, the word “Mobile” no longer exists and suffix “Series” is must for a full product name.

At Mobile World Congress 2010 on 15th February 2010, Microsoft announces its new strategy and show off the new UI with integrated experiences of Windows Phone.

See it for yourself what is cool and new with Windows Phone 7 Series here.

But we have yet to talk about the development platform for the applications and games for Windows Phone 7 Series and we are leaving it till Game Developer’s Conference and MIX 10 – both happening in coming March 2010.

Follow @ckindel on Twitter and subscribe to his blog; when we have something to say he’ll be one of the first to say it. So, make sure you are the one who gets the updates first, too ;)

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Release Candidates

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:46:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft ships Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidates and RC bits are currently made available to MSDN Subscribers.

They will be available for public download from 10th Feb onwards. Stay tuned for the public download here.

After trying out the release candidates, please spend a moment to give us your valuable feedback through our survey site below.

Have fun exploring what you can do with Visual Studio 2010 and how you can be a better developer!

Updated (10-Feb-2010): For the existing beta 2 testers, here is one of the motivation factors to try the RC.

Updated (12-Feb-2010): For the existing TFS 2010 Beta 2 users, here is the upgrade guide written by Bryan Krieger.

Updated (17-Feb-2010): Training Kit is updated for Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate, too.

Follow-up from February UG Meeting Lab Management Talk

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:10:00 GMT

I had a great evening sharing how Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 helps reduce the overhead of setting up multi-tier test environment, raises the quality bar of your software by eliminating “no-repro” bugs, and enables frequent software releases for testing/user preview with its end-to-end build automation. I hope the audience has also witnessed how a tester can use the Test Manager 2010 to perform the manual testing and report a rich bug – attaching video, IntelliTrace log file, and system information, etc., to the developer.

The PowerPoint deck used during my talk is attached in this blog post.

Those who want to learn more about installation and configuration of Visual Studio Lab Management 2010, you may want to visit this site - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ee712698.aspx. As mentioned during my talk, Lab Management team blog is something you shouldn’t miss out if you want to get latest updates and learn the tips and tricks about how to work with the product.

Not forgetting that Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager play an important role in providing virtualized environment for Lab Management 2010. Learn more about these technologies from the below links.

Virtualization with Hyper-V: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-main.aspx

SCVMM on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scvmm/default.aspx

SCVMM team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/

Happy testing and fixing bugs!

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 is now available !!!

Softwaremaker — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:18:59 GMT

Via here: BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 is now available !!!

These 2 factors are great improvements, or rather - fixes:

Better reliability, performance, and scale for the following key features

Throttling and dehydration of orchestrations.
Archiving and purging operations.
BAM alerts and archiving.
HIPAA.
Reduced memory consumption in scenarios using scripting functoids.
Improvement in the bts_FindSubscription stored proc, resulting in faster execution and lower CPU utilization.

Better management and deployment experiences

Performance and user experience improvements of key scenarios.
WCF configuration management.
Significant improvement in deployment time for send ports using a map.

While still some time away, I am very looking forward to BizTalk v.Next where there will be some very interesting innovations to push the low latency envelope (every bit of pun intended).

Updated Visual Studio 2010 Launch Countdown Gadget

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:46:27 GMT

Rob Caron revealed the revised VS 2010 launch date in his short and sweet blog post. Visual Studio 2010, originally targeted to be on March 22, 2010, is now set to officially released on April 12, 2010.

Here I am sharing my updated countdown gadget which I promised in my earlier blog post. As of writing this post, below is what my countdown gadget shows me.

Happy waiting while coding in Beta 2!

More Visual Studio 2010 Guidance Packages on CodePlex

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:36:18 GMT

Last week, I blogged about the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance released by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers team. The same team has released the Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server (TFS) Requirements Management Guidance and also updated the version control branching guide previously released for TFS 2008 to use the latest TFS 2010.

Requirements Management Guidance

This package focuses on the People, Process, and Technology guidance for Requirements Engineering (RE) using Team Foundation Server. The goal of this guidance is to provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle.

Go get your copy of Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Requirements Management Guidance from CodePlex now!

Branching Guide

As you probably knew, branching and merging of source code for an enterprise project environment is no trivial matter. This guide focuses on applied and practical examples of branching that anyone can apply whether or not Team Foundation Server is the version control repository. This updated 2010 release includes discussions around branching concepts and strategies but also focuses on practical hands-on labs (and yes, you will need Team Foundation Server 2010 for this hands-on labs)

Go get your copy of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010 from CodePlex now!

Rangers shipped Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:34:57 GMT

Visual Studio ALM Rangers team has published the Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guide on CodePlex. The package includes posters and overview documents to keep you updated with various aspects of ALM capabilities provided in Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010. Cheat sheets in this package are good discussion topics for your 5-min coffee breaks with your techie colleagues.

What is in the package?
The download package consist of three seperate ZIP files containing a number of quick reference posters and quick reference sheets in XML Paper Specification (XPS) format:

Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – Overview (Default Download)
- An overview of the guidance and focus areas, contained in one index table and overview quick reference poster.
Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – Basic Guidance
- A collection of basic guidance sheets, focusing on the “what” are the key features and “why” to consider them.
Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – Supporting Guidance
- A set of documents and quick reference posters, supporting the basic guidance sheets.

Kudos to Steven van Niekerk (Technical Lead / Architect, BB&D South-Africa) who initiated this unusual project with his question “Can you tell me about TFS and VSTS in 5 minutes?”, Willy-Peter Schaub who lead this Ranger project with many other unsung heroes (including MVPs) who have contributed to this guidance in one way or another.

Resize your hard disk partitions for free using EASEUS Partition Master 4.1.1 Home Edition

darenhan — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:03:00 GMT

EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE disk partitioning utility for extending system partition, better disk space management, settling low disk space problem under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 (for 32 bit Only - How to figure out Windows 32 bit or 64 bit?).

Check it out:

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecision.web, version=10.5.3700' on web page.

darenhan — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:46:00 GMT

Problem:

Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecision.web, version=10.5.3700' on web page. I found the register tagprefix tag under the code behind of the aspx page has the following tag and figured it is a dll problem.

<% Register TagPrefix="cr" Namespace="CrystalDecisions.Web" Assembly="CrystalDecision.Web, Version=10.5.37... %>

Solution:

Navigate to SAP BusinessObjects url : http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=56787567

And download the crystal dlls version 10.5.37. Install the crystal GAC dlls on the web server.

Restart the IIS as the GAC is now refreshed with the latest crystal reports dll.

Santa Brought TFS 2010 Virtual Machine this Christmas!

Anonymous — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:36:00 GMT

For those who want to try Visual Studio Ultimate and Team Foundation Server 2010 but didn’t have the time or resources to set it up, here is a little something from the Santa!

Visual Studio ALM Team has released a VM which includes everything you will need to evaluate and learn the ALM capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (with the exception of Lab Management) this Christmas. So, staying home and not out for partying to count down the New Year 2010 is not a bad thing after all.

This VM is made available in the virtualization platform of your choice (Hyper-V, Virtual PC 2007 SP1, and Windows [7] Virtual PC). Hyper-V is highly recommended for its performance benefits and snapshot capabilities. These images will effectively expire on April 9, 2010 when the SQL Server Trial expires. You will also receive Windows activation messages while using this VM – this is because of the way Windows Server 2008 trial behaves and is to be expected, and you can ignore / cancel these activation dialogs when prompted. If you want to get rid of these activation warnings you can activate the image using your own product key (e.g. from your MSDN Subscription). You may want to do the same for the copy of Office which is installed.

Here are links to the VMs with the various virtualization platforms. You only need to get one as per your choice of platform.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Hyper-V)
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Windows [7] Virtual PC)
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (Virtual PC 2007 SP1)

And don’t forget to check out Brian Keller’s post on how to use a download manager to grab these files in a faster and more robust manner.

To get you up to speed with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010 enhancements, Brian has also posted a preliminary set of 7 hands-on-labs (compatible with this VM) on his SkyDrive. Stay tuned as there are more in the works. Note that each lab/demo is designed to work in isolation from the other labs, so be sure to have a rollback strategy in place (VPC undo disk / Hyper-V snapshots) prior to working on a lab. To download these labs please visit http://cid-8c96cc4d0756cacb.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/Blog%20Attachments/2010%20Beta%202%20Labs?uc=3 (you can click on “Download as ZIP file” to grab everything at once). These labs will be making their way into a refresh of the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit soon.

Wishing all of you a Merry Christmas & a Blessed New Year !!!

and ... Happy Holidays !!!

PS: For those who have not gotten over with Visual Studio Team System 2008, we have also released the updated version of VMs with the extended expiry date - January 31, 2011.

Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 + Team Foundation Server 2008 (Hyper-V)
Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 + Team Foundation Server 2008 (VPC 2007 SP1)
Team Foundation Server 2008 ONLY (Hyper-V)
Team Foundation Server 2008 ONLY (VPC 2007 SP1)

Visual Studio 2010 Launch Delayed!

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:33:57 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 was set to be released on 22nd March 2010 and the news was announced during the SharePoint Conference 2009.

Last week, S. Somasegar - Senior Vice President, Developer Division announced in his blog post that the launch has been pushed back by a few weeks as the engineering team needs some time to address the reported performance issue relating to virtual memory usage. The good news is that there will be a public Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio 2010 with a broad “go live” license in Feb 2010 timeframe for us to have another round of preview and provide feedback before it goes live.

So, I will be updating my Visual Studio 2010 Launch countdown gadget once the new release date is announced from the product team.

My Personal Collection of TFS Resources

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:12:57 GMT

Here I am sharing a list of good TFS resources/links which I personally reference or use to learn more about Team Foundation Server.

Team Foundation Server Home – well, obviously I cannot ignore this link.
Team System Café is a centralized place that aggregates and showcases the latest information concerning Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server, Expression Blend, and community events.
Team System Live is all about Live Microsoft Visual Studio Team System events. Pre-recorded videos are great, but there is no substitute to attending a live event and getting your specific questions answered in real time.
Radio TFS provides tons of podcasts on TFS for your Zune player (or iPod). It is a good way to keep yourself updated on the move.
Blog entries by Martin Woodward – a Lead Architect for Teamprise, which has been acquired by Microsoft recently. You can learn more about how TFS helps in the heterogeneous development environments.
Blog entries by MSFT folks

Brian Harry – a Technical Fellow
Jason Zander – a General Manager, Visual Studio, Developer Division
Brian Keller – a Technical Evangelist for VSTS
Buck Hodges – a Development Manager for TFS

Oops! By the way, as you may have heard, we are doing away with Team System (VSTS) branding as it creates a lots of confusing for our customers. In the next release of our Visual Studio 2010, the naming of Visual Studio editions will follow the rest of our key products such as Office and Windows; i.e., Visual Studio Professional, Premium, and Ultimate.

REF: What the "Black screen of death" story says about tech journalism

Softwaremaker — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:12:25 GMT

Sigh. I try to avoid commenting or referencing public marketing furor over Microsoft because I am just not a cult-fanatic or hold a religious view on technology (for Goodness sake - Get a life ...) BUT the story that PervX ran that says: "Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP" is really saying something about the responsibility issues that comes with technology journalism.

Gosh - really, is there nothing we can do about this ?

Obviously, PervX was made to eat their own words. They issued a public apology to Microsoft but there is obviously still a sense of denial in between the lines.

Ed Bott says it best here and how I wished this furor they caused stays with them for a long time until redemption time comes. As what Ed says in his closing para: "As for Prevx, they deserve to be laughed out of the security commmunity for their role in this fiasco."

Some things to take note when migrating MOSS 2007 definitions to SPS 2010, note 1

kitkai — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:13:00 GMT

I'm in the process of migrating some of my discussion forum work from MOSS 2007 to SPS 2010, in preparation for two presentation. One is IW Community organised by Malaysia SharePoint usergroup, while the other is CTU 2009 II , organised by Singapore Community. When deploying the content type definitions using sandbox solution (I love this!!!), I get an error. Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': Key cannot be null. Parameter name: key Was looking at what did the product...(read more)

Announcing the New Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:37:00 GMT

The Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform supports the development of applications across Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Windows Forms, allowing easy consumption of Facebook services delivered through the Facebook Open Stream API.

November 2009 UG Meeting

microlau — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:42:00 GMT

This month’s UG meeting is held on 17th November 2009, at Level 22 CF12, NTUC Building from 1845 – 2115 hrs. Light Refreshments will be served before the session. Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 Maung Maung Phyo. MVP (Security) 1900 – 2000 hrs Programs coordinate work. The code for coordination and state management often obscures a program's purpose - making it hard to maintain and enhance further. Join us in this user group meeting to learn how programming with...(read more)

Retrieving GUID of a WF Workflow Service

Softwaremaker — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:07:56 GMT

Q: There is a _WF_ workflow service which contains only one pair of Receive and SendReply. Data will be sent through the Receive activity and how do I get the workflow service to return the GUID of the workflow instance in SendReply activity.

A: Write a custom activity to retrieve it (See below). Bind that to a variable and bind that variable to the SendReply.Content

    public sealed class GetWorkflowInstanceId : CodeActivity<Guid>
    {
        protected override Guid Execute(CodeActivityContext context)
        {
            return context.WorkflowInstanceId;
        }
    }