Those who know me know that I like to gain a little bit of knowledge and experience on a lot of different things. This includes learning as much as I can on new Microsoft technologies to both add another feather in my cap, and to equip myself with a large skill reservoir to call on in times of need.
With that desire I ventured into Windows Workflow Foundation, or as its better known WWF or WF for short. WF is a technology created for the purpose of designing processes or work flows to facilitate procedural processing for line of business applications. With WF the developer, using a visual ‘work flow’ form, can drag-and-drop procedural components to build out a new system process. For example in the work flow toolbox there is an ‘If’ and ‘IfElse’ logic component that can be dropped onto the work flow to build out the logic gates to be followed. With each logic component there is an ‘action’ event that will be handled as a result of heading down one path or another. The action is an event that will then execute a section of code based on the ability to continue moving with the flow.
This is pretty nice since it allows for developing a finite process with visualized logic components/conditions. Each action acts as an event that is able to be continued by handling the passed in event args by setting true/false depending on whether the action was successful. Neat.
While I think that WF is pretty useful it was not exactly what I was hoping it would be. The learning curve to jump into WF is somewhat high, the benefits don’t merit man-hours retrofitting existing systems, and some developers may be thrown off by reverting back to a system of procedural code wrapped up in an event centric fashion. That’s just my first impression though, and it will most likely change over time. I'll probably use WF for one-off personal projects, but using WF in a production environment with other developers still struggling with writing/maintaining legacy code it’s more of a hindrance than help.
WWF