• Windows Workflow Foundation
• Windows Communication Foundation
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Windows Card Space

You can download these from here

One of the architects asked me to give him an overview of WF, and here it is an extract of that…

In this article I will be talking about the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and its various features. This will provide a bird eye view of the technology.

Why WF, why not WWF?

There are a lot of talks around, of the new workflow model which Microsoft has come up with. Some of the good features of WF are:

Designer Features in Visual Studio

• The design IDE is inside visual studio, for this there are VS extensions for WF from Microsoft, you can get them here.
• As always, the IDE is very good, helpful for the developer, toolbox with most of the activities. Drag and Drop from the Toolbox and ready to go.

Learning Curve

• As always with any new technology, there is some sort of learning curve involved.
• Even if you have some BizTalk experience, you will find some difficulty in getting started with the technology.
• Especially at every instance you have to create interfaces and use them. It’s good and makes it more generic.
• In short it will take at least 40 hrs (5 working days) of training to get hands on with WF.

Features provides by WF

• Types of Workflows
  • Sequential
  • State Machine

This is different from BizTalk, in which you can only create sequential workflows.

• Web Services support
  • Consuming Web Services
    • For consuming WS, WF provides various activities like
      • InvokeWebService
      • Just give the URL of the WS and provide the name of the method and parameters to pass. Done.
  • WF Exposed as Web Service
    • For exposing a WF as a WS, WF provides activities like
      • WebServiceInput
      • WebServiceOutput
      • WebServiceFault
• Error Handling in WF
  • Activities provided in WF for Error handling are
    • SynchronizationScope
    • CompensatableTransactionScope
    • TransactionScope
    • Throw
    • Terminate
    • Suspend
• Create Custom Activities
  • Just like custom controls, we can also make custom activities in WF, Activities can be of two type
    • Primitive : Made from scratch
    • Composite : Built from other existing activities
  • You can also change the look and feel of the activities.
• Tracking service
  • Window Workflow Foundation provides a SQL Server based tracking service
  • You can track Workflow Events, Activity Level Events and User Tracked events. But I don’t think there is something as HAT as of now. You can always go and create this
• State Persistence in WF
  • WF uses SqlWorkflowPersistenceService for this, which internally used SQL Server database.
• Business Rules
  • There are some custom activities which are provided out of the box in WF for Rules
    • ConditionedActivityGroup
    • Policy
    • If-Else
  • You can also call BizTalk Rules from WF
    • There is an article on this from Matt Milner. You can see it here
• Hosting WF
  • WF in windows console application
  • WF in an ASP.NET application
  • WF exposed as WS i.e Host the WF from WS in IIS.....Provides the scalability of the Web Farm architecture
  • Hosting WF from BizTalk
    • A method call within an expression shape (Problem with the scalability architecture)
    • Consuming a WS hosting a WF workflow
  • Host a WF from WCF web service
• Share Point Server with WF
  • http://solutions.corasworks.net/showroom/ctab8.aspx

Some Use full links on WF

1. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480215.aspx
2. http://www.topxml.com/BizTalk-Orchestration/re-50241_Community-Content-for-WF-WCF-and-BizTalk-Server.aspx