Windows Workflow
There are 9 entries for the tag
Windows Workflow
If you're interested on Windows Workflow and its future, I recommend to watch the Kenny Wolf 's section from PDC. I can summarize it in a word: revolution!! The actual Workflow Framework and runtime seems to be totally revisited and the news are summarized as follows: Activity Authoring is simpler and takes much less code Fully declarative workflows and activities Alignment across Expressions, Rules, and Activities Seamless Composition Across Flow Styles Runtime 10-100X Performance Improvements Full control over persistence Flow-in Transactions Partial Trust Support Integrates with WCF, WPF, ASP.NET Tools Designer Performance and Usability...
Frequently I'm involved on speaking where we present products like Dynamics NAV, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint and all the new .NET 3.5 platform in general. One of the common aspects that I like to put in evidence is that all these products (except NAV) supports natively one of the coolest aspects of the new .NET platform: Windows Workflow (it's not a mistery that I'm a Windows Workflow lover and I like to show that with Windows Workflow you can build modular business processes). One of the common question that often I receive is: can we extend Dynamics NAV with Windows...
In these days I was involved on the migration of lots of my services under the new .NET 3.5 platform (WCF and WF).
Today I've tryed to expose a Windows Workflow as an XML Web Service and now I've a dilemma... :)
OK... let's go from the beginning...
With Windows Workflow is quite simple to expose a WF as an XML Web Service. Start Visual Studio 2008, New Project and choose Sequential Workflow Library:
Then, exactly like WCF, you need to define an interface that will act as the interface to the workflow (I've used VB.NET in my project):
Interface IWS
Function MyMethod(ByVal Input...
Some days ago Gerry O'Brien published on his official Microsoft Certification blog a summary of the planned Training Kits for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Certifications and their current expected release dates (plus some news about Training Kits for SQL Server 2008). My surprise was to see that in this list there's a planned Training Kit for WPF, a planned Training Kit for WCF but no planned Training Kits for Windows Workflow. Fortunately Microsoft has planned also an exam for this new technology (Exam 70-504: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Windows Workflow Foundation Application Development) so why not having...
In these days we're observing lots of curiosity and interesting around the Workflow capabilites in Sharepoint and during our demos I'm trying to show to my customers that you don't need to be an expert on Windows Workflow Foundation in order to create the biggest part of the workflows that your business needs. If you decide to adopt the Sharepoint platform, you've a powerful and adaptable workflow platform and you've a tool that can really tune up your business: Sharepoint Designer. Sharepoint Designer has an intuitive wizard that permits you to build, compile and install a workflow on a Sharepoint...
Some weeks ago I was invited to leave feedbacks on a survey published by Microsoft about the next version of the Workflow Designer. One of the coolest feature about the actual WF Designer is that you can rehost it inside any custom application (for example a Winform application) and you can enable your end users to edit processes or simply to to visualize and monitor the workflow state. For my little experience I've done in these months on trying to rehost the WF Designer, I can say that it's not so easy as someone could imagine. However, despite the difficulties...
On the last VSTO Power Tools package there's an interesting SharePoint Workflow Package Generator, a simple tool that creates a WSP file from a VS 2008 SharePoint workflow project. As described by Nikhil Kothari's announce: The package generator uses the feature.xml file to generate a WSP file. In the WSP file, it will also include any <ElementFile> that have been referenced. Hence, any referenced InfoPath forms and resource files will also be packaged in the WSP file. To use the package generator just type: “c:\Program Files\Microsoft VSTO Power Tools 1.0\workflowpackagegen.exe" /featureManifest:feature.xml " An example of incorporating the tool into...
One of the key concept of the new Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 platform is absolutely Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), the framework that enables you to build sequential and state-driven workflow capabilities into your existing applications. I've always written in the past that WF will be always more an important part of every enterprise architectures and it will be always more a key concept on the future MS Dynamics architectures. The future Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Titan) will be natively based on Windows Workflow and the workflow functionalities will be exposed via web, in order to have multiple target of your...
In the actual Enterprise architectures, workflows are always more an essential part and in a modern architecture there's always more the need to have a flexible way to manage the various business processes. Microsoft has developed an interesting and powerful platform for modeling business workflows and lots of its new products are starting to use the new Windows Workflow platform. Also on the ERP side Microsoft has receive the need to manage workflow and in the last Dynamics NAV 5.0 magically has appeared a new feature called "Document Approval". Nothing revolutionary (our company for example has developed a custom and...