Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Windows Workflow - Toy or Not? (Not)

InfoQ - Things to know about Windows Workflow Foundation

"Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications.  Harry Peirson, in several blog entries delves into Windows Workflow Foundation, (WF), with “Things I didn’t realize about WF” and “More Stuff I Didn’t Know about WF”.  Paul Andrews also posted ten reasons why WF is not a toy.

..."

As WF get's closer to its release I'm sure will be seeing a number of flame wars on why it sucks/rocks/etc...

Spending 40 hours+ this week at training getting WF.* Inserted into Greg.Brain, I feel it's a very impressive and mature 1.0. I have to wait and implement it in the wild, but right now it feels more like a v2 to v2.5... (This is probably due to the fact that much of the lessons learned in BizTalk orchestration have been applied to WF).

What will help are real world starter kits, examples, code snips, etc. And not just for the gee-wiz stuff like activities, but the workflow to host communication (and host to workflow), service's, etc.

We need to see it in action... Simple and complicated both, but start simple maybe with some thing like a book/music/dvd inventory & collection starter kit with WF built in. WF to manage lending (state machine wf), the adding of new items (sequential wf), etc.

There's a great deal to wrap your head around. For many of us it's going to require some mental gear shifting to "get it." The easy stuff is very easy to get, but the hard stuff is hard...  ;)

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