These are some of the topics addressed in the WF presentation on Wed Jan 17th by Jon Flanders, Microsoft MVP on BizTalk, in the San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group meeting. As defined on netfx3, “Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications. WF radically enhances a developer’s ability to model and support business processes.” Jon’s presentation consisted of two parts. First part was focused on BizTalk in which he demonstrated in an easy and user friendly way how to write a Hello World application in BizTalk. In the second part of presentation Jon discussed the WF framework explaining how and where to use it effectively. His talk was full of examples code samples, demos and real world scenarios which made it quite interesting. Participants bombarded him with questions (a good sign showing that people are paying attention) which Jon answered with comprehensive explanation. His code sample can be downloaded from here and the link to the live version of his work flow designer is as follows.
http://www.masteringbiztalk.com/atlasworkflowdesigner/ Jon was also kind enough to provide us link to his workflow samples page - which has a link to the code at the bottom. http://www.masteringbiztalk.com/wiki/default.aspx/MyWiki/Workflow%20Samples.html
The presentation was an excellent learning experience and from post-meeting comments was very much liked by the SGV.NET members. We hope that Jon would continue to come and speak to our user group in the future.
Windows Workflow Foundation is not a new idea but it’s a much better implementation of work flow orchestration to date. About four years ago in London I attended a presentation by Stephen Mellor in which he described the idea of having executable UML and the enterprise benefits behind it for instance ease of code maintenance, higher visibility and faster prototyping. With WF, we have much more modular architecture consisting of Activity Model, Workflow designer, workflow runtime and rules engine, I like to call it “executable flow charts”. Like Jon mentioned in his presentation, round tripping is one of the key features supported in WF which has always been a problem in the past. Previously if your model has changed or your code is modified, there was no synchronization and document would quickly start getting out sync. With WF, your model reflects the source code and vice versa.
The inside scoop about project Silver was quite interesting which supports the integration of WF and WCF bringing the best of both worlds together.
Reading and Further References.
Jon Flanders is an industry-leading author and instructor of in-depth developer training materials at Quicklearn. Jon is the author of "Mastering Visual Studio .NET" from O'Reilly and "ASP Internals" from Addison-Wesley and co-author of "Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation" from Sams. Jon holds a Juris Doctor from Hamline University. He has been working with .NET and ASP.NET since early betas and with BizTalk 2004 since its release in March of 2004.
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