This week I attended DevDays in The Hague. The most interesting or intriguing for me was Workflow 4. Matt Milner did a preconference Wednesday and some session during the conference. He did his demos in VS2010 Beta 1, which is available right now. I downloaded beta 1 and installed in on (YES!!) Windows 7 RC on VPC (that is possible). Windows 7 is just marvelous and runs smoothly inside my VPC (It is goodbye Vista).
You can download his code and session material from his blog. Ok lets turn to VS2010 Beta 1 and WF 4. I am not a Workflow expert, but i did follow its evolution in 3.0 and 3.5 during conferences in Holland and abroad, like VS2007 in San Francisco (beautiful city, open, warm and liberal). I must say I was impressed at first what it could do and experimented a few things after I attended some of the sessions, but since I am more in BizTalk doing project in that space the interest for workflow went to the background of my mind. Now I got interesting for me again with new .NET framework 4 so I went to Matt sessions (look at his slide deck). Things have changed in WF 4 and most vivid are a new workflow type Flowchart (state machine is not there yet and is only one working in Beta 1), no code behind (all XAML now and original goal of workflow), and interop with workflows 3.0/3.5. A different designer with other color palette (looks similar to OSLO).
You can check things out yourself by downloading Beta1 VS2010 and install inside a VM (VPC), and check out Matt’s Stuff. There is also a new WCF/WF training kit out that you can try. Have fun.
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