Final day at VS Live in San Francisco. I following today the post conference about introduction (gentle) into workflow by Ken Getz and Robert Green. This lasted all day and went through what workflow is, creating one for the first time (this was demoed already a couple of times during conference, so nothing new here), and how to host one (see my previous post with WF Runtime Architecture). Next subject was handling conditions and Exceptions, where they went through a couple of activities like IfElse, While, ConditionedActivityGroup, Replicator Activity and finally Exception handling. After this they discussed and demoed more activities like delay, handling properties, listen, suspend and terminate, parallel, synchronizeScope and handling cancellation. This was not the end of it, because more activities coming up, like ones used when dealing with rules, Policy Activity (see there’s a lot of them, more than in BizTalk Orchestration). Rules in workflow are somewhat the same as in Business Rules Engine used in BizTalk i.e. priorities, forward chaining and modifying them at runtime. Finally last three subjects where Workflow communications, State Machine workflow and using and building persistence. Ok if you want to try it out you will need .NET Framework3.0, Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP or Vista and Visual Studio Extensions for Workflow. Things that were demoed can be found here. And if you want reading material, APress got some books like Foundations of WF (An introduction to WF) and WF Pro. I also got a book called Essential Windows Workflow Foundation by Addison-Wesley.
