Moustafa Khalil's Space

The .NET Workflow Service has been part of the .NET Services platform for multiple CTP releases. Its architected to be the "cloud" Workflow hosting solution. The .NET Workflow Service was built on top of WF 3.5. Lately, we made a decision to build on top of WF 4.0 to take advantage of the enhancements WF 4.0 provides and because having a Workflow solution built on top of the latest framework version is what customers have been asking for. As a result, we will hold off releasing .NET Workflow Service as part of the .NET Services platform until after .NET Framework 4.0 ships. Please read the post here for more information.

يا أيتها النفس المطمئنة ارجعي إلى ربك راضية مرضية فادخلي في عبادي وادخلي جنتي

On the 29th of March 2009 my father and my professor Prof. Dr. Khalil M. Ahmed of the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University passed away peacefully in the comfort of his own house in Alexandria, Egypt. An obituary by our dear friend and professor Dr. Mina Abdel Malek of the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University and the American University in Cairo is published here in the Egyptian daily paper “Al-Masry Al-Youm” in his honor. A translation of an earlier version of the obituary is attached. 

Prof. Dr. Khalil is survived by his wife and my mother Prof. Dr. Awatif Hafez of the School of Nursing, Alexandria University, his daughter any my sister Dr. Mona Khalil of the School of Medicine, Alexandria University, his son and my brother Mohamed Khalil Ahmed of Microsoft, and myself. He is remembered by all of us, his extended family, his friends, colleagues and former students.

I am honored to be my dad’s son and student.

We just published 4 whitepapers on .NET Services: an intro, a workflow, service bus, and access control specific ones. Check them out here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5057e2b3-c8e5-4b26-a601-ff9621589ce3&DisplayLang=en

Jenny talks about the steps you need to follow to create your first .NET Services solution. A great post. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jennylo/archive/2008/11/04/a-step-by-step-guide-from-creating-a-net-services-solution-to-running-the-multicast-sample.aspx

A few folks asked about the set of supported activities in the Nov 2008 CTP of .NET Workflow Service.

In the current release, Nov 2008 CTP, the Workflow Service supports a subset of the WF out-of-box (OOB) activities and some activities for the .NET Services platform. Therefore, the WF Workflows that the Workflow Service would run can only have these activities. The list is below. In the future, we plan to support more OOB WF Activities and provide more activities for the .NET Services platform.

In order for you to easily design .NET Workflow Service, you should visit http://www.microsoft.com/azure/netservices.mspx to download and install the Microsoft .NET Services (Nov 2008 CTP) SDK. After installtion, lanuch VS2008, select File-New-Project-CloudWorkflow and choose CloudSequentialWorkflow template. The toolbox will contain the set of supported activities and the root activity will perform design time validation.

Supported Activities

OOB WF Activities

• IfElse
• Sequence
• Suspend
• Terminate
• While

.NET Workflow Service Activities

• CloudSequentialWorkflow -- Root Activity
• CloudDelay
• CloudHttpSend
• CloudHttpReceive
• CloudServiceBusSend
• CloudXPathRead
• CloudXPathUpdate

Please visit the MSDN library here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd129879.aspx to learn more about the .NET Workflow Service activities.

If you didn’t fill your absentee ballot yet please take some time to vote this Tuesday. I personally think the 2008 presidential election is of great magnitude but please remember this Tueday's election is not just a presidential one. All seats in the house of representatives, 33 seats in the senate and 11 governor seats are up for election.

Please take some time to vote.

If you’re @ PDC, come to BB27 this Thursday @ 1:45 to learn more about .NET Workflow Service. During this session, I’ll talk about the .NET Workflow Service roadmap and how you can use the live CTP bits this Thursday @ PDC.

Also, there are a lot of good sessions on Thursday that you don't want to miss. I would recommend going to TL31 "Oslo": Building Textual DSLs @ 12:00 to hear more about Oslo.

Last PDC in 2005, I was part of the team that announced Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as the new declarative programming model in .NET Framework. WF allows you to focus on writing the core logic of your application, declaratively. It handles a lot of complications and logic that exist in applications that orchestrate services or coordinate work. WF is best for programs that are long running; i.e. stop and start during their lifetime. We released key developer enhancement in each version of the framework, and will continue to do so.

As more people started using WF, they needed to write WF hosting environments to run the workflows in a scalable and reliable manner – if you ever wrote a server application you will immediately realize that this is not a trivial task. They also needed to invest and maintain infrastructure – for some businesses this is not an economical option.

Over the last months, myself and few other people spend all our time focusing on cloud-based hosting environment for workflows. The goal is to allow you to run workflows in a scalable and reliable off premises host which Microsoft wrote and maintain its infrastructure. Earlier today, at PDC 2008, with the help of a lot of people across the company, we announced the Microsoft off premises hosting environment for workflows: .NET Workflow Service. .NET Services and .NET Workflow Service are part of Microsoft Azure Services platform. Workflow Service runs declarative workflows in an off premises hosting environment which Microsoft wrote and maintain its infrastructure.

Please visit the developer center here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/netservices to learn more about .NET Services and .NET Workflow Service. Also, you can download the SDK and start using the services by visiting http://portal.ex.azure.microsoft.com

Send me an email through this blog or visit the discussion forums here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/netservices/threads/ if you have any questions or feedback on .NET Workflow Service or .NET Services in general.

Thanks

The PDC team is regularly posting a list of sessions. Lately, they posted a session to give me the opportunity to talk to you about Cloud-based Workflow Services.

Workflow Services: Orchestrating Services and Business Processes

Presenter: Moustafa Ahmed

See how simple it is to use cloud-based workflow to perform complex orchestration across on-premises and cloud services. Also, learn how to run processes in the cloud while simplifying your system and increasing reliability in a distributed environment.

Note that the sessions titles, scope, and defintions are not yet final. The PDC team also published a few other cloud services related talks in PDC. They are a lot to write down here so make sure to check them out here. The following are some sessions where you’ll hear about what our team has been busy building:

Architecture of the Building Block Services - Dennis Pilarinos, John Shewchuk

Messaging Services Deep Dive: Trust Zones, Data Centers, and Multi-Tenant Services at Scale - Clemens Vasters

Securing Your Service Using the Federated Identity Services - Justin Smith

SQL Server Data Services: Futures - Patric McElroy

Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service - Steve Marx

Developing Applications Using Data Services - Presenters: Pablo Castro, Mike Flasko

Check Matt Winkler’s post here on published Oslo sessions.

PDC this year is going to be great; tons of announcements on cloud-based services, modeling and other projects different teams have been working on in the last few years. I hope to see you at PDC this October in L.A.

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 appreciated.

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