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Our team has posted a set of WF 4 Migration documents on MSDN.
You'll find 4 papers initially -
- an overview document which introduces migration concerns and what to do for the WF3 developer.
- a best practices for WF3 development paper - how to design your WF3 artifacts today to help with the move to WF4
- a document on Rules guidance which I've authored
- a document on State Machine guidance
You can find them here:
We hope you find these documents useful, and I am personally interested in hearing from the Rules folks on the guidance I've provided in the Rules document.
Earlier this week, we released Beta1 to MSDN subscribers. I am happy to share that the bits are now available for general public download! Go get them here.
In addition to the Beta1 samples I linked to, you may also find the training kit useful - it has more detailed walkthroughs of key features. Get it here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wcfwf4
When you download VS2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1, you do not automatically get the samples.
To get the SDK samples that the team put together, go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5aca0622-d87d-4cc9-a22c-0d58205a56b4#tm
Here's a link to the Beta1 forums where you can provide feedback and ask questions:
Our team will be watching the WF Beta1 forum closely!
I'm finally excited to share that .NET Framework 4.0 Beta1 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 is being released this week! After having kept it low key and quiet for so long, and a limited distribution at the PDC last year, it is great that this week, Beta1 will be available more generally. Today, Beta1 bits were released to MSDN customers and Beta1 documentation went live on MSDN. In addition, forums have been created for soliciting feedback. On May 20th, Wednesday, Beta1 will be available on MSDN download center for everyone. Here is the VS 2010 page.
Me and my team definitely look forward to hearing all the feedback you have on Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.0.
We will be publishing content about WF 4.0 on http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint
Finally, the PDC week is here.
At the Ray Ozzie keynote this morning, he announced Windows Azure - www.azure.com - Windows in the Cloud. Azure will be the basis for the Microsoft Services Platform. .NET Online Services, Live Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services and CRM Services are all technologies that add value to the cloud platform helping you build highly scalable and available applications that run on the cloud.
In addition, we've unveiled a few new initiatives and downloads - check them out here!
I will be giving a chalk talk in the Tools, Languages and Frameworks Lounge on the 4.0 Activities on Day 4 at 10:15am. See you there!
The premier Microsoft conference, the PDC - Professional Developers Conference, is happening in the week of Octobert 26th in Los Angeles! Microsoft stars will join movie stars and present a bunch of upcoming technologies and paradigms to thousands of developers.
There are still seats left, so please register if you havent already. You can pre-register for sessions you'd like to attend here.
We have a few talks on the technologies my team works on - WCF/WF. I hope to see you at these sessions or in the lounge where a bunch of product folks will be hanging around waiting to answer your questions. We know we've been quiet and we want to break the silence!
WF 4.0: A First Look, 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.
WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0, 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
WF 4.0: Extending with Custom Activities , 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.
WCF: Developing RESTful Services , Steve Maine
Learn the latest features in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for building Web 2.0-style services that use URIs, HTTP GET, and other data formats beyond XML. See how these features can be applied to AJAX web sites, "REST" applications, and data feeds.
Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative Programming Using XAML , Rob Relyea/Daniel Roth
If you're using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), or Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), then XAML is your new best friend! Learn how an entire application-from presentation to data to services to workflow--can be authored using simple, declarative XAML notations introduced in the next version of the .NET Framework. Learn about XAML additions like: support for generics, object references, non-default constructors, and more.
WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale , Nicholas Allen
Join us for an interactive lunch discussion about different kinds of performance and scale requirements that are a crucial part of any distributed systems development life cycle. Learn the principles of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) throughput and responsiveness optimization. Hear about WCF scalability improvements in the next version of the Microsoft .NET Framework.
WCF and WF have been out since November 2006, and they are both still relatively new technologies. To help get started, our marketing team has worked with our friends over in Pluralsight to set up a weekly 7 - 12 minute screencast series exploring short, targeted topics.
The first screencast went live this morning and can be found here. Hope you find it helpful! It is a short screencast that walks you through creating your first WCF Service Library using Visual Studio 2008, and then hosting and testing it using the tooling support that went in the Visual Studio 2008 release. From the initial release and practically no tool support in Visual Studio 7, we've come a long way in providing the tools needed to quickly develop and test services by deploying them locally on your development box!
In the regular weekly series, you will see various topics on both WCF and WF. If you have request for specific topics, please let us know and we can try and cover those.
Cliff Simpkins and others from our marketing team have also created a new team blog - the 'endpoint' blog in case you haven't seen it yet. Various team members will be posting content on the blog, hope to see more on Oslo and the .NET Framework 4.0 around and after PDC.
Our marketing team has launched a series of MSDN webcasts to explore the possibilities of Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework through demonstrations and deep dives on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
You can find links to our June MSDN Webcasts here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework35.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=liveall
Doug is looking to hire, and I can tell you he's great to work for! Check it out if these sound exciting to you!
http://douglaspurdy.com/2008/04/29/emacsnet/
http://douglaspurdy.com/2008/04/29/new-languages-compilers/
RuleChainingBehavior.UpdateOnly has been supported in WF Rules since .NET Framework 3.0. It allows you to explicitly participate in the forward chaining process.
Rule attributes are RuleRead, RuleWrite, RuleInvoke which can be placed on methods that potentially modify or read variables being used in rules.
To learn more about this, please go to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480193.aspx#introwork_topic5.
We are trying to find more about the usage of these features - if you are using it in your WF Rules apps, please email me (contact me through my blog) as I am interested in learning about your scenario. We are considering changing the design here and want to determine the impact and understand what kind of scenarios it is being used for today.
RuleReevaluationBehavior has been supported in WF Rules since .NET Framework 3.0. It is an enum that you can tweak to control forward chaining and the re-evaluation on a per rule basis. Typically this property is used to prevent infinite looping due to dependencies that the rule has, either on it's own actions or on other rules.
To learn more about this, please go to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.workflow.activities.rules.rulereevaluationbehavior.aspx or http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480193.aspx#introwork_topic5.
We are trying to find more about the usage of RuleReevaluationBehavior - if you are using it in your WF Rules apps, please email me (contact me through my blog) as I am interested in learning about your scenario. We are considering removing this knob and want to determine the impact and understand what kind of scenarios it is being used for today.
The final bits for 'Orcas' or .NET Framework 3.5 are now available for download! I must say this was a relatively quick, feature packed release for us.
Get it here.
For the Connected Framework team in which I work in, we concentrated on 4 major themes for this release:
*Make WCF into a great platform with support for all common web formats. This includes work we did for ASP.NET AJAX, XML and JSON encoders, syndication support with RSS and ATOM, and first class REST support
*Integrate Workflow and WCF. I must say as one of the folks running our community/customer program within the team right now, I see this as the #1 reason why customers are moving to Orcas. Being able to build services using workflows & make them long running and durable; and exposing workflows as services are both pretty powerful features.
*Finish WS-* work. We completed the standardization process for WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Transactions and WS-Policy.
*Provide tooling! This was one of the other big customer asks. When we shipped 3.0, we had add on packages for VS (as CTPs) for WCF tooling. With Orcas, this is now release quality and part of VS.
We look forward to adoption of the 3.5 platform!!
Paul Andrew and co. have just released BizTalk extensions for WF. This is a really cool piece of technology as people have been asking whether to use BizTalk Server or Windows Workflow Foundation when they want to implement a business process. This SDK allows you to avoid that choice by using both WF and BizTalk together :)
If you use WF, you can now build an orchestration and deploy it to BizTalk Server and the workflow can now use BizTalk features such as adapters, management infrastructure etc. If you use BizTalk, you can now try out the new workflow programming model while still continuing to use the enterprise features in BizTalk Server. Best of both worlds! Thanks Paul and co.
This past week, we announced "Oslo" at the SOA-BP conference in Redmond. Oslo is the code name for a group of technical investments we're making over the next couple of years to simplify designing, building and managing composite applications. This is what I've been working on since we shipped WCF and WF in the .NET Framework 3.0. I'm specifically working on the Rules features we're adding in the next version of the .NET Framework and on the Activities we will ship in the .NET Framework.
Read more about Oslo here.
We would like to know what Activities you want us to ship with in the next version of Windows Workflow Foundation. To help us with prioritizing our development effort, we've created a survey. We would really appreciate if you could take some time out in responding to the survey about the current and future usage of Windows Workflow Foundation activities and share your feedback on where you want us to invest going forward. Thank you in advance for helping shape the future of Activities!!
The link to this online survey is: https://live.datstat.com/MSCSD-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=WF_Activities_Survey_blog
It's been a while since I blogged, due to vacations and just a lot of work. I also have some additional responsibilities at work and now own Activities, Rules and Community which has been keeping me busy. Part of the reason I am busy is that I have two open Program Manager positions, both posted on our career site - one for Rules and one for the Community that I am actively trying to fill.
I am attending the Business Rules Forum next week in Orlando where I am co-presenting a session on "Workflow and Rules: Better Together" with InRule's Theresa O' Neil. Looking forward to see what's new in the Rules community.