Moustafa Khalil Ahmed's Space

InfoWorld talks about BizTalk Services R12 and Workflow here.

We released BizTalk Services R12 Release today. R12 contains the first public release of BizTalk Workflow Services. Please read Clemens' announcement post here for more detailed information on R12's BizTalk Worklfow Services and major changes to the Messaging and Identity BizTalk Services in R12.

Please go to workflow.biztalk.net and try the service today! Any feedback and comments are welcomed.

Thanks, --Moustafa

Hello World!

Its been few months since I wrote last time. I’ve been super busy over the past few months working various efforts.

In late 2007, we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5. The release contained significant WF framework and tooling enhancements and some WF Rules enhancements based on your feedback. After shipping VS 2008 and .NetFx3.5, I worked in what I used to refer to as v.Next of workflow. This v.Next got formally announced in November and this is what we ended up calling "Oslo". In short, Oslo brings modeling mainstream. Oslo bits are getting hardened by the hour and is going to be great.

I worked on the Oslo Workflow bits for a couple of months then I went to work with the BizTalk team on some BizTalk planning. In case you haven’t heard the news yet, last April, the BizTalk team announced the plans to ship a BizTalk Server 2006 R3 release. I am excited about this announcement and the BizTalk future plans.

On one of the Seattle sunny days, I was having lunch with Dennis Pilarinos whom I worked with on WF v1 and the early days of .NetFx 3.5. Dennis Pilarinos, David Wortendyke, and John Shewchuk started an incubation team and were regularly pushing bits to Labs.BizTalk.Net providing you with experimental connectivity and business process technologies on the web. Dennis and I started talking about this over few lunches.

Over a couple of lunches, Dennis and I started entertaining some ideas about the future of BizTalk.Net. During this time, one of the familiar names in the SOA world, Clemens Vasters, joined Dennis’ team and few others as well. After I finished the BizTalk planning phase, I decided to join Dennis’ team to work on bringing different web technologies to you via BizTalk.Net.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a lot of smart people solving some web problems. We’re planning to release some bits in the near future to BizTalk.Net with some new features which I will write about when it happens.

Stay tuned, I will be right back :)

A lot of developers wanted to build WF workflows and host them in BizTalk Server. Jon Flanders and others wrote the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Extensions For Windows Workflow Foundation SDK V1 to show you how to do this. Check it out here.

The Connected Framework team is planning for the next version (v.Next) of WF and WCF and one of the work items if planning for the set of out of box (OOB) Activities to build. We created a survey to gather your feedback on the current set of WF OOB Activities and understand what your need to see in v.Next. The survey is located here. Please take sometime and fill the survey to help us build a great v.Next.

--Moustafa

WF Pageflow is a popular request from customers all over the globe. Shelly Guo, Israel Hilerio and Matt Winkler of Microsoft with Jon Flanders' help just released a WF Pageflow sample to show you how you can use WF to drive the execution behavior of an interactive process. You can get the bits here and check Matt's post here for more information.

Next week @ TechEd 2007 in Orlando, I’ll present a WF Rules Extensibility breakout session. If you’re at TechEd and interested in learning more about WF Rules Extensibility, come to the session.

I plan to give a brief overview of Rules and WF Rules but most of the session will be around extensibility points. I recommend you read the Introduction to WF Rules Engine MSDN article here and/or watch a recording of an Introduction to WF Rules talk here if you're unfamiliar with WF Rules Engine basics.

While you’re at TechEd, don’t miss the TLC. I, and a lot of other colleagues in the team, will be in the SOA TLC in TechEd. There will be people from WF, WCF, BizTalk, CardSpace, HIS and other technologies within the division. Please stop by the TLC is you have any questions about any of SOA and Web Services technologies.

We just posted a VB version of the WF hands on labs. You can find them here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2e575633-e357-4ee7-aaff-34138f00e830&displaylang=en. Enjoy!

Update: When you download the exe file and extract it, you will get the VB.Net sample in a VB folder under \Labs. There’s a type in the download details box where it says C#. We’re working to fix this issue. For now, download the HOLs and enjoy them!

If you don’t know already, the Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” March CTP is released to the web here.The combined WCF and WF teams added the following functionalities to Orcas: 

·         WF Designer and Debugger integration with Visual Studio

·         WF & WCF integration:

o    New WCF Send and Receive Activities

o    Enhanced Workflow and Service hosting

·         Enhancement to WF Rules:

o    Added support for operator overloading

o    Added support for the “new” operator to allow users to new up objects and arrays from WF Rules

o    Added support for extension methods to make user’s experience calling extension methods from WF Rules compatible with how they code in C#

·         Partial Trust support in WCF when using the BasicHttpBinding

·         Enhanced REST/POX Support in WCF

·         RSS and Atom Programming Model

·         Atlas Integration, end-to-end programming model for building Ajax style web applications using WCF services

·         Support for OASIS specifications WS-AtomicTransaction 1.1, WS-Coordination 1.1, WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1, WS-SecureConversation 1.3, and WS-Trust 1.3

·         New Templates for simplified WCF Service Authoring

In addition, we fixed a couple of issues that we got feedback about from customers, like you.

Check the Orcas release notes (aka readme) here for a list of known issues with the CTP and how to workaround them. In addition, Matt Winkler, our platform evangelist friend, listed a couple of caveats with the CTP here.

CTPs are a great opportunity for us to get some feedback from our customers, so check Orcas out and let us know what you think about the bits. If you have any feedback or questions about the WCF and the WF pieces you should contact us via the public WF forums here and the WCF forums here. You can also contact me via my blog here. If you have any feedback or questions about Orcas, you should use the Visual Studio Orcas forums here.

Enjoy Orcas.

--Moustafa

Last Janruary MSDN published two articles on WF Tracking: David Gristwood authored a Tracking Services Introduction article here, and Ranjesh Jaganathan authored a Tracking Services Deep Dive article here.

David works in the Microsoft Developer and Evangelism Group in the UK, and Ranjesh was part of the core product team that worked on WF Tracking. Great articles by WF Tracking experts. Check them out.

Paul Andrew writes on what to use WF for, excellent information for you and your customers. Check it out here.

The Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group released a DinnerNow.Net sample. Get the scoop from Matt or James or David. In short, the website is a factious marketplace that is built using several Microsoft technologies. The source code for the sample is released on codeplex.com here. DPE are planning to continuously publish updates to the sample and we encourage the community to use it, help with ideas, and report bugs.

The DPE team is enthusiastic about developers and enterprises and are constantly coming up with new ideas to reach out to the developers. Its simply phenomenal to see them shipping such a great end to end application and its source code to the world.

Enjoy the DinnerNow.Net.

--Moustafa 

P.S. DinnerNow.Net reminded me of a project I worked on when I first graduated: otlob.com, it’s the first online delivery site in Egypt. Its different now than it was when we started it.

Kushal Shah, Software Design Engineer/Test on the WF Rules Feature Team, just published a sample on the community website that shows how to use WF Rules outside the context of the workflow to control and drive the page flow of an ASP.Net application. Check it out here. This sample was the latest addition to the Rules sample list on the community website. Check out the complete list of Rules samples on the community website here.

In addition to samples, you can also find WF presentations and some tutorial and labs code and documentations on the community web site (http://wf.netfx3.com/).