Windows Workflow 4 Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation 4 in VS 2010

 Philip Nelson   Science Officer PAi 

Why Are We Here?  I am interested how to coordinate people and systems to get stuff done  Each on their own timelines  I am interested in graphical programming tools that help communicate what software does to others  I am interested in programming that is more responsive to changes at runtime

Why is Microsoft here?  Microsoft continues to invest in workflow. WWF1 – 3 and now WWF4  Even though developers hate workflow

Why?

Overview  Microsoft isn’t very clear about the strategy but….  They are aligned with the rest of the very lucrative BPM industry that is trying to get more involvement from business users in system development

Overview  Today, WWF 4 is a developer tool first and foremost

Lets see some code

Tracking

Execution

Highlights  Activities can be “composed”  Everything is an activity  Parallel execution is natural act  Going idle and restoring is a natural act  The designer can be hosted in other apps and…  Workflows can be loaded dynamically from xaml

Highlights  Fast and adept up and down in scale

Challenges  Though AppFabric may help, instance management is not on par with other commercial products  Tracking remains always involves custom coding with tracking events

Challenges  There is no obvious path to debugging an existing workflow in flight, resetting it’s path or variables.  While it could be said to be an advantage, WWF4 provides nothing for end user UI  Hard to imagine managing hundreds of workflows with tens of thousands of instances

What are the essentials of workflow  good design for incorporating people with contextual information into a workflow  good design for incorporating back end systems and purchased applications into a workflow  ability to see progress of workflow in flight and manage instances (errors, restarts, escalations)  productive design environment

What are the essentials of workflow  Stable Execution Environment  Clear metrics of processes and performance  ability to safely deploy new versions of long running workflows

How does it stack up to other products?

How does it compare to SharePoint workflow?

How does it compare to Windows Workflow Foundation 3?

More Information    Ron Jacobs video on channel 9  Ron Jacobs wrote a VS2010 guidance package  The Problem Solver blog,  MSDN samples - us/library/dd483375(VS.100).aspxhttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd483375(VS.100).aspx

 Philip Nelson   Science Officer PAi 