␡
- Describing Workflow and Workflow Systems
- .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5
- Overview of WF
- Standard Modeling Activities
- Multiple Workflow Styles
- Hosting
- Tracking
- Rule Capabilities
- Custom Activities
- XAML Workflows and Serialization
- Dynamic Update
- WF and WCF
- SharePoint Workflow
- Designer Rehosting and External Modeling
- Summary
- Installation Instructions
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Summary
This hour first outlined workflow in general, discussed common workflow categorizations, and looked at BPMSs. It then provided a brief overview of WF. Then it covered a number of WF's capabilities. Let's now look at six of the main benefits offered by WF, having gone through its capabilities:
- Design-time transparency—This is intrinsic because the workflow that executes also graphically describes the process.
- Runtime transparency—The tracking infrastructure and tools built to leverage the infrastructure supply visibility to running processes.
- Runtime flexibility—XAML allows processes to be run without precompilation and be retrieved from databases, and dynamic update allows processes to be changed at runtime.
- State management—The workflow keeps track of the current step, idles and persists as necessary, restarts when appropriate, and can even skip or redo steps.
- Domain-specific languages—Domain-specific languages can be created by adding a collection of custom activities and potentially a customer designer to go along.
- Participate in network—WF's integration with WCF permits it to expose itself across the network and to access network (cloud) services securely and reliably.
These benefits combine to form a better way to create application logic.
The rest of this book consists of explanations and accompanying labs that walk you through most areas of WF.