Workflow WOW

Today was PDC wow day for me…

At the keynote, the wow was the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) announcement. WWF is a full fledge member of WinFX, on par with Windows Communication Foundation (aka Indigo) and Windows Presentation Foundation (aka Avalon).

The demo of WWF was very impressive. If the shipping version looks anything like the beta 1 we saw today, it could mark a fundamental shift for developers and their apps.

I just hope it doesn’t die a PDC death (like My Services, etc, etc). I’m willing to bet that it will ship though… Not only does it fills such a dramatic and long unfulfilled need, but it’s to be used in many other parts of WinFX and other MS products (like the next version of BizTalk, SharePoint V3, Office 12). Sure that doesn’t mean there’s a 100% chance that it will ship (think PDC 2003 and the WinFS hype), but still it increases its chances.

I’ll be attending a couple more WWF sessions tomorrow, and am already thinking about how I can use it in my apps. It’s not shipping until “Mid 2006”, but this is one beta I might use in production early…

Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow for more details.