Windows Workflow Foundation Advanced Techniques - Slide Decks and Demos

Yesterday was a very exiting day for me. It was the first time I gave a talk in a Microsoft developers event, and it really meant a lot to me. I had put a lot of effort into this talk (creating the presentation, creating the demos and stuff), and it was all worth it. People had an interesting time, the atmosphere was great,  and due the high demand, instead of repeating this session one more time, I repeated it twice! Many people came to me after the presentation to tell that is was great. I got back home very satisfied and looking forward to my next talk…

I would like to receive any comments you may have about the talk, the presentation and the demos. And Of course, if you have any questions about them or regarding WF, I would love to help.

I will go over the main issues of the talk here in this post for those who couldn't come or for those who had forgotten something, but let me remind you that the recordings of the presentation should be on-line in about 2-3 weeks.

Long running Processes

It is impossible to create a long running process within a scope of one method, and it is also not scalable and robust. We talked about the persistence service, and about how easy it is to create long running workflows using WF.

Providing Transparency

All those places in your business logic code where you log data, do not provide you with flexibility of changing the definition of the data you log while your system is running. We talked about the tracking service, and how you can change your tracking profile to get the data you want.

Workflow Rules!

Using rules and conditions lets you turn a very complex business login into a very flexible point in your application. No matter how complex it is, you business process is still readable and easy to follow. We talked about conditions activities (If-Else, While) and the PolicyActivity.

Dynamic Update

In order to respond for unforeseen events or circumstances, and change a single instance of a process, without the need of compiling and redeploying, we talk about Dynamic Update, and saw how much flexibility it can add to our systems.

Summary

WF is more than dragging activities from the toolbox into the designer, but it a new approach for building business processes.

The processes we build using WF are very easy to read and follow, no matter if it contains complex logic, or it is a long running process. As they say, "A picture's worth more than 1000 words!" (or lines of code, in my case…)

Finally we can focus on the business logic only, and leave all the extra components to be added as runtime services.
WF not only let you deal with daily problems more easily, and make you very productive, It is also a very interesting technology to use, and also very fun.

I encourage everyone that has no experience with WF to download , install what is necessary and play with the technology, and encourage people who already played a little with it to explore it more to ensure you take out the best of it, which is a lot!

Resources

Here are some resources to get you started:

WF MSDN Developer Center – Contains the list of MSDN articles from introductory level to advanced. I also contains the list of downloads and installations required for WF.

WF Community Site – Contains the WF Hands on Labs, many samples, custom activities and screen casts.

WF MSDN Forum – Where you can ask questions, and usually get response in a few minutes, due to its popularity.

Slide Decks and Demos

You can download my slide decks, and my demos (with all the stuff I hadn't have time to go over during the session). To make the demos run well, unzip them in to C:\WF\Demos directory.

For more slide decks and demos from the Microsoft Developers Academy, go here.

Enjoy!