What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

WF Team Bloggers — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 04:56:59 GMT

We established that Windows Workflow Foundation isn't an end user product in a recent entry . In this

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Krishnan — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 08:14:02 GMT

I find Dave Green's <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/davegreen/archive/2005/09/17/470704.aspx">post on this same topic</a> very useful.

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

werner — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 09:34:41 GMT

i have written a excel-like application with the Infragistics Ultragrid.

More then 200 Columns, 1000 Rows....

every Cell (!) uses a RuleSet (WF-RuleSet) to calculate the Layout (the Layout depends on multiple Values in multiple Cells)

With the RuleSet-Editor the Layout-Rules are high customizible for my user/customer

it works fast!

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Daniel Oliveira — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:33:59 GMT

Hi Paul...

Great post.

I'm building a software using WF.

I'm using WF because clients have different business logic. So I'm leaving the funcionality of build the business logic to clients. I think it is a very interesting use. I'll build a example to put in www.codeplex.com to brazilian software developer comunnity (I'll make the documentation in portuguese) know better about WF using. I'll build a virtual store and I'll use workflow to pageflow, to save data on database, to tracking and transaction.

使用WF来干嘛？

Michael-_-Young — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:47:55 GMT

我们在上次的文章已经提及了WF工作流不是一个终端用户的产品。在这篇文章里我想表明一下我的观点：开发人员到底应该使用WF来干嘛？WF是.net3.0框架中的一个新技能，开发人员必须在他们创建的解决方案使...

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

farmerbuzz — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:05:19 GMT

It seems to me that Workflow would be useful any time you're implementing a non-trivial state machine in software. Is this the case? It seems that since everybody describes state machines in terms of a diagram anyway that it would be most natural to make changes to the diagram itself and have that propagate to code. Is there something I'm missing as to why this would be a bad idea? Is it not worth the cost when you don't have a large number of processes to manage or they don't change very often?

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

pandrew — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:43:24 GMT

Hi Farmer Buzz,

Yeah you could use it just as a state machine in code. For simple state machines the separate context that workflow instances run on will be a consideration. Marshalling is required to get data into and out of workflow instances. You can donate your thread to the workflow instance so that it doesn't run on a CLR Thread Pool thread, but you would still have to send data into and out of the workflow using marshalled messages.

Because of this it makes most sense to put your end to end business process in the workflow instance.

Regards,

Paul

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Ratnam — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:48:28 GMT

Dear Developers,

most of us think that MWF is just another tool in the pandora box to write application. I think quite differently. I think this is going to be a new way of writing applications. The use if we think carefully is very extensive. If we put our mind to it we can nearly write anything using MWF with minimum code. The catch is if MFW takes off we are not going to wait for IT engineers to write applications for us but we are going to write our own applications as per our needs. At one time IT staff did the spreadsheets for thier finance department. Now they Finance do it themselves. It is not what the technlogy can do for us but what we can do with technology.

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Jules — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 18:56:44 GMT

I am not convinced by WF in real business logic applications.

Real life business gets complicated quickly, with exceptions. The resulting Sequence/ State diagrams become complicated quickly defeating the objectives of a WF presentation. I have seen a WF Webcast, which involved over thrity activities, and exception branches, to model what seemed like a simple business process. The Presenter lost the audience, because the WF was so complicated, scrolling over 3 windows wide,and 4 windows down.Very unconvicing.

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

pandrew — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 09:46:14 GMT

Hi Jules,

I'm not familiar with that web cast please share the URL. Certainly there are challenges in creating workflows for large business problems. It sounds like your example was using activities that were too low level for the business problem being solved.

Regards,

Paul

Should you use Workflow Foundation?

Mike Taulty's Blog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:58:19 GMT

Just highlighting Paul's great post that he wrote the other week about "What to use Workflow Foundation...

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Todd — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:07:30 GMT

I am contemplating using WF on a rather large ASP.NET project that we are embarking on, but the options are so vast and the learning curve so steep that I'm not sure where to head with WF.

In our design we heavily rely upon swimlane diagrams to model business processes. I have always thought that workflow (from a business perspective, not a technical one) is about the transfer of responsibility for a given work entity, and swimlane diagrams document that transfer very elegantly. e.g. The responsibility for an Order transfers from order fulfillment to shipping once the order fulfillment folks have assembled the order. This can also be modeled as a transition in a state machine, but state machines are confusing to look at for long, complex business cycles that are being modeled.

I want to set up business rules that define what work must be performed (from a DB perspective, this means validating the existence of certain rows|entities and that certain fields in those entities have data) before the transition to a new state, or transfer of responsibility, is allowed to occur. I also want to notify the next responsible person via email when they have work to do.

It's not clear to me what the best path is to achieving this in WF. Does anyone have experience with this scenario?

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 10:47:05 GMT

What I think WF is best for:

http://udidahan.weblogs.us/archives/362

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

juma — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:27:22 GMT

One of the problems that I have faced with using the workflow is if we have to change the workflow due to a change in business requirement. Making the change to the WF is easy but the real problem happens when there are instance of the workflow which have already started and stored in the tracking/persistance stores.

Now the new workflow definition does not serialize to the existing workflow definition and causes problems.

I do understand that changing the workflow in the middle can be disastrous but I am unable to find solution to handle my scenario.

To be more elaborate about my scenario if there is a state machine with states A --> B--> C --> D.In an ideal world (:-)) , when I am in state B changes to state C or D should not cause any problems.

I guess I am going to have to write my own custom serialization which can handle changes to workflow definitions gracefully. Please let me know if you heard of any other solution for my scenario.

Thanks.

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

pandrew — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:18:22 GMT

Hi Todd,

With WF we are trying to provide the low level technology for workflow solutions that is well known and can be considered a solved problem. The engine represents this but there are many things above the engine that we haven't built and could be built in many different ways for many different types of scenarios.

We don't have swim lanes out of the box in WF and we also don't have the concept of assigning something to a resource or person. These can be easily built on top of WF and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server does provide task assignment to people. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who is planning to build swimlane technology on top of WF as I have described.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Paul

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

toddwprice — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 07:27:24 GMT

Paul, I am indeed interested in the idea of building swimlane technology on top of WF, but don't have any plans, as we're a project shop, not an ISV. For the present that helps clarify the direction for this project. For the future: any ISV's out there planning to build Swimlane on top of WF?

If so, here's what I want:

- Swimlane designer (lanes, tasks, transfer|flow - don't remember what the UML guys call these)

- Ability to associate with a business object assembly

- Optionally specify rules on transfers to other tasks, each of which must evaluate to true in order for the transfer to be allowed. (e.g. "Order.DeliveryCarrier is specified" before transfer goes to the shipping dept.)

- Specify rules about who is notified when transfer occurs

Any takers?

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

pandrew — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 21:39:40 GMT

Hi Todd,

I'd recommend you take your request to the WF MSDN Forum. See http://www.windowsworkflow.net/forums

Regards,

Paul

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

toddwprice — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:04:21 GMT

Good idea Paul. I posted it to the forum:

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?postid=1291607&siteid=1

Some Biztalk and WF links

Miguel Campos Blog — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:48:20 GMT

If you have some questions regarding BTS and WF and when to select one, the following may be useful:

re: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for?

harsha.koder — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:54:47 GMT

Hi,

I have some doubts regarding WF and BTS

1.Can Business Process Orchestration be done without BTS i.e., only with WF.

2.How is WCF connected to all of this..

Integrando Procesos de Negocio en ASP.Net

JuanPablo@Go7Cha5 — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 23:05:06 GMT

Hoy por hoy, las empresas y el mundo de los negocios esta siendo sometido a una especie de terremoto,