Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation - Softcover

Woodgate, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0672328488 ISBN 13: 9780672328480

Publisher: Sams, 2005

Synopsis

Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation is a premium reference that provides information on a key part of WinFX, providing universally accessible and consistent workflow technology for the Windows platform. Windows Workflow Foundation delivers an API as part of WinFX and a workflow designer hosted in Visual Studio 2005.

The Windows Workflow Foundation supports development of both sequential and state-based workflow involving both human and system interaction. Sequential workflow is a map of activities that may be in series or parallel. State-based workflow is a state machine where events cause transitions. Rules can be specified that drive decision making in a workflow and can be updated easily at runtime. Workflow can be created as a model and executed inside many host applications including Windows Forms, console applications, or Web applications.

• Key Scenarios that can be developed with Windows Workflow Foundation include:
• Document management: The steps involved in the review and approval of shared documents or other content.
• Line of business application: The processing flow or business logic in an extensible part of the application.
• Website page flow: The flow of state variables between web pages.
• IT management: Handling of common systems management processes.
• Decision making logic: Where complex business logic is well described by a sequential or state diagram.
• Consumer: A common series of steps for consumer PC usage.

Download the source code from the book at www.samspublishing.com

About this title

About the Author

Paul Andrew is the technical product manager for Windows Workflow Foundation. He has also worked for Microsoft both as a developer evangelist and as a developer consultant.

James Conard is an architect evangelist with Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group. James is responsible for driving the early adoption of Windows Workflow Foundation with key ISVs and customers.

Scott Woodgate is a group product manager responsible for technical product planning and worldwide readiness of BizTalk Server and Windows Workflow Foundation.

Jon Flanders is an industry-leading author and instructor of in-depth developer training materials at DevelopMentor.

George Hatoun is a program for Workflow in Microsoft Office. He defines Office workflow engine requirements and the integration of Windows Workflow Foundation into Windows Sharepoint Services.

Israel Hilerio is a program manager on the Windows Workflow Foundation team in charge of forms integration and designer re-hosting.

Pravin Indurkar is a program manager on the Windows Workflow Foundation team and is responsible for the state machine workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation.

Dennis Pilarinos is a technical program manager on the Windows Workflow Foundation team. He is responsible for defining and creating the developer tools and parts of the programming model for Windows Workflow Foundation.

Jurgen Willis is a program manager with the Windows Workflow Foundation team. He is responsible for the rules technology and condition-driven activities.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Introduction

Windows Workflow Foundation was announced at the Professional Developers Confer-ence in 2005 and it will be released in mid-2006. This book is written for Beta 1 of the technology and as such it is possible that some parts of the book may be out of date when the technology is released.

The book is intended to give you an introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation and you can read it chapter by chapter, or you can read the first three chapters as an introduction and then skip around to points of interest. You can read it offline (perhaps when you commute to work on the train) or you can work through the examples at your computer. To follow along trying out our examples, you will need Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and Windows Workflow Foundation SDK Beta 1. With or without a computer, you should have at least six months of .NET development experience.

This book is not intended to be your reference guide as you develop an application using Windows Workflow Foundation so it doesn't comprehensively cover all the APIs. To find out more, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow.

There are nine authors on the book and they represent a combined experience of more than 30 years in Workflow and related technologies. I have the privilege of working with a very experienced and talented team. We are all very excited about bringing this state-of-the-art Workflow engine to the Windows platform. We hope that by using it you can find yourself new opportunities for building all kinds of interesting software.

Someone once told me that Workflow is the happy state you get into when your work just flows. Read this book and perhaps you will agree.

Paul Andrew Product Manager for Windows Workflow Foundation Microsoft Corporation

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sams
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0672328488
• ISBN 13: 9780672328480
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312