Matt W's Windows Workflow Place : PDC2008

Which WF/WCF Talks Should You Attend at PDC?

mwinkle — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:19:10 GMT

Just got the email the other day that PDC is less than 4 weeks away, and it got me thinking a bit about how I would think about these sessions as an attendee. Searching on the PDC site will yield 8 talks tagged with WF. Here's how I break some of these these down, the first few are about using WF, and the last 3 are about WF itself:

Hosting Workflows and Services

Dan Eshner

Hear about extensions being made to Windows Server to provide a feature-rich middle-tier execution and deployment environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications. Learn about the architecture of this new extension, how it works, how to take advantage of it, and the features it provides that simplify deployment, management, and troubleshooting of workflows and services.

This talk is all about the host we're building for WF and WCF, which I mentioned earlier, we're calling "Dublin". If you're familiar with either technology, and have built a host of your own, this will be interesting both from the perspective of what is coming, as well as how we are thinking about solving some of the hosting problems.

A Lap around "Oslo"

Presenters: Douglas Purdy, Vijaye Raji

"Oslo" is the family of new technologies that enable data-driven development and execution of services and applications. Come and learn how to capture all aspects of an application schematized in the "Oslo" repository and use "Oslo" directly to drive the execution of deployed applications.

Building declarative or data driven apps is a "thing" in the Oslo world. This talk will give the big picture of all of the various pieces of Oslo, and how existing declarative technologies, like WF and WCF fit into it. Note, this talk is not primarily about WF or WCF, rather it is about Oslo, which you can read about in more detail here and here.

What about all of the things we are doing to WCF and WF in .NET 4? That's the remaining three talks:

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0: A First Look

Presenter: Kenny Wolf

Programs coordinate work. The code for coordination and state management often obscures a program's purpose. Learn how programming with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 provides clarity of intent while preserving the functional richness of the .NET framework. See how easy it is to build workflows with the new Visual Studio workflow designer. Learn about text-based authoring options for WF. Hear how WF integrates well with other Microsoft technologies (WCF, WPF, ASP.NET). If you've looked at WF before, come and see the changes to data flow, composition, and new control flow styles. Significant improvements to usability, composability, and performance make Workflow a great fit for a broad range of solutions on both the client and the server.

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0: Extending with Custom Activities

Presenter: Matt Winkler

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) coordinates and manages individual units of work, encapsulated into activities. WF comes with a rich library of activities. Learn how to extend this library by encapsulating your own APIs with custom activities. See how to compose those basic activities into higher level units using rules, flowchart, and state machine control flow styles. Learn how to build your own WF control styles. Learn how to customize and re-host the workflow authoring experience using the new WF designer framework.

Windows Communication Foundation 4.0: Building WCF Services with Windows Workflow Foundation in Microsoft .NET 4.0

Presenter: Ed Pinto

Eliminate the tradeoff between ease of service authoring and performant, scalable services. Hear about significant enhancements in WCF and WF to deal with the ever increasing complexity of communication. Learn how to use WCF to correlate messages to service instances using transport, context, and application payloads. See how the new WF messaging activities enable the modeling of rich protocols. Learn how WCF provides a default host for workflows exposing features such as distributed compensation and discovery. See how service definition in XAML completes the union of WF and WCF with a unified authoring experience that simplifies configuration and is fully integrated with IIS activation and deployment.

Kenny's talk will be an introduction to all of the new features in WF. If you haven't used WF, or if you looked at WF before and decided it wasn't right for your solution, come to this talk to see how WF makes writing programs easier. If you are using WF today, and want to see what has changed, this will be a good talk for you.

My talk will be a very hands on, write some code, style talk focused on building activities and all of the aspects of WF that impact activity development. If you are using WF today, and want to see what the changes mean for the code you'll write, this is the talk for you. Also, if you attend Kenny's talk and think, "hey, I want to learn more" this will also be the talk for you. My talk won't focus on the "why" or the "where" of workflow, but more the "how to build" parts.

Finally, Ed's talk is the talk to go to if you are a WCF developer. If you are building programs that consume services, where service is very loosely defined integrating external information into your app, you should also make sure to go to this talk. This talk will highlight a number of the enhancements that have been made both to WCF and to the integration between WF and WCF. We believe very strongly that WF and WCF are tremendously complementary technologies.

To help, I've put together the following decision table to help you decide. There are three possible actions, "Must Attend" "Should attend" and "Would Enjoy". I think they are fairly explanatory actions, but if you have questions, let me know.

	Kenny's talk: A First look	Matt's Talk : Building Activities	Ed's talk: Building WCF Services with WF
Building WF today	Must attend	Must attend	Must attend
Building WCF today	Should attend	Should attend	Must attend
Looked at WF, but didn't use it	Must attend	Must attend	Should attend
Looked at WCF, but didn't use it	Should attend	Would enjoy	Must attend
Interested in Oslo	Must attend	Should attend	Should attend
Interested in the problem of coordination	Should attend	Should attend	Should attend
Building services, or apps that consume services	Would enjoy	Would enjoy	Must attend

Can't wait to see you in LA!

WCF Perf Talk @ PDC (or, the Doctor Teaches Fishing)

mwinkle — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:06:54 GMT

I'm probably not going to have too much time to attend talks at PDC, but one talk that would be high on my list is the one that Dr. Allen blogs about here, where he talks about the Zen of WCF Performance and Scale.

I like "Zen" style talks, especially for topics like performance and scale. Sure, I could go and listen for 75 minutes for tips and tricks that may be applicable to my scenario, but this is giving you a fish. Having a 75 minute conversation about how to think about perf and scale, how to think about achieving that in a distributed messaging system teaches you how to fish. This is going to equip you with a lot more knowledge about how to plan for and solve performance and scale issues down the road.

This is one lunch session, I wouldn't want to miss. As a plus, he's taking questions and suggestions on his blog, so fire away!

More Details On WF/WCF in .NET 4.0

mwinkle — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:15:27 GMT

Steve Martin, a director of product management for CSD, has a blog post containing more information on the work that we are doing for the next versions of WF and WCF that we will release as a CTP at PDC. He also introduces "Dublin," the name for our efforts around creating a manageable and scalable host for WF and WCF applications, something that I know a few customers would be interested in.

For you WF and WCF fans, there some more information about some of the features that you'll hear more about at PDC. I think for customers who are using either today, you'll see something on the list below that gets you interested. And, if you're not using WF or WCF today, I think there are a few things that might make you interested. We think that the features we're introducing (especially in WF, which is close to my heart) will make it easier to use WF, in more places, and by more people. Let us know what you think. What's exciting in the list below, what do you want to hear more about, is there something else you'd like to see on the list?

WF Features

Significant improvements in performance and scalability

· Ten-fold improvement in performance

New workflow flow-control models and pre-built activities

· Flowcharts, rules

· Expanded built-in activities – PowerShell, database, messaging, etc.

Enhancements in workflow modeling

· Persistence control, transaction flow, compensation support, data binding and scoping

· Rules composable and seamlessly integrated with workflow engine

Updated visual designer

· Easier to use by end-users

· Easier to rehost by ISVs

Ability to debug XAML

WCF Features

RESTful enhancements

· Simplifying the building of REST Singleton & Collection Services, ATOM Feed and Publishing Protocol Services, and HTTP Plain XML Services using WCF

· WCF REST Starter Kit to be released on Codeplex to get early feedback

Messaging enhancements

· Transports - UDP, MQ, Local in-process

· Protocols - SOAP over UDP, WS-Discovery, WS-BusinessActivity, WS-I BP 1.2

· Duplex durable messaging

Correlation enhancements

· Content and context driven, One-way support

Declarative Workflow Services

· Seamless integration between WF and WCF and unified XAML model

· Build entire application in XAML, from presentation to data to services to workflow

PDC, 2008

mwinkle — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:51:17 GMT

The site went live last night, check it out and I hope to see you there.

A few of the sessions that caught my eye.

Windows 7: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency and Battery Life

A single application can reduce mobile battery life by up to 30%. Windows 7 provides advances for building energy-efficient applications. In this session we will discuss how to leverage new Windows infrastructure to reduce application power consumption and efficiently schedule background tasks and services.

Windows 7: Touch Computing

In Windows 7, innovative touch and gesture support will enable more direct and natural interaction in your applications. This session will highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications.

Windows Mobile: Location, Location, Location

Mobile location based services are the next "big thing", and this session will review the tools and technologies Windows Mobile makes available to developers wanting to integrate location into their applications. Location acquisition, services integration, mapping and visualization, and best practices will be discussed.

Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive

You've heard about Microsoft's new software+services platform Live Mesh, combining the world of the web and the world of digital devices. Come take a look under the hood and learn about the underlying service architecture behind this mass-scale cloud service and client platform. We'll look at services such as FeedSync-based synchronization, accounts and security services, P2P communications, pub-sub infrastructure, and the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE).

Architecture of the Building Block Services

Dive into the architecture that links many of the building block services and lets ISVs and businesses deliver compelling solutions. Learn how to compose these services to create applications in the cloud and connect them with on-premises systems. In this session we'll cover the next generation of messaging, data, identity, and directory services, and how they help developers.

oh, and this one...

Advanced Workflow Services

This session covers significant enhancements in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Workflow Foundation (WF) to deal with the ever increasing complexity of communication patterns. Learn how to use WCF to correlate messages to service instances using transport, context, and application payloads. We'll show you how to use the new WF messaging activities to model rich protocols and how to use WCF as a rich default host for your workflows and expand the reach of WF with features like distributed compensation. See how service definition in XAML completes the union of WF and WCF with a unified authoring experience that dramatically simplifies configuration and is fully integrated w/ IIS activation and deployment.

We'll probably have a few other things to talk about with WF as well ;-)