Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) compare to other Products

I get asked this question a bit from people who have heard of WF but have not read much about it. This applies to BizTalk Server 2006, Office SharePoint Server 2007, SourceCode K2, Skelta, Captaris, other BPM products, etc. Here’s how I explain it. I’ll try to avoid the million analogies that could be used here.

WF is a software developer technology

• It’s the programming model, engine and tools for building workflow-enabled software on Windows
• It gives software developers a model driven tool which is higher level but still integrated with .NET code
• It’s seriously extensible to enable a wide range of software development projects that require process execution or business logic execution
• It’s targetted at Independand Software Vendors (ISVs) both Microsoft products and external product developers. We spend a lot of time planning the features for this audience
• It’s been successfully used by many MS products and customer projects despite only being released in Nov 2006

WF is not a software product

• It doesn’t have a server process that you can directly run in a data center, you have to build this or integrate with IIS
• It doesn’t have administrative tools, reporting tools, management tools or monitoring tools. We have some samples for these that you can work into your softwareproducts
• The workflow designer is best suited to developers, not business analysts. Though I have heard of some projects using our designer with a business analyst buddying with a software developer and our designer is freely redistributable.
• It doesn’t have tools that IT Pros need or end users need. It’s focussed only on what software developers need

To review WF is a great technology for building software that has process, workflow or business logic requirements. Software products can benefit from this by using a common low level engine and focus on implementing business value for their users. But don’t think WF is a product you can directly deploy for an end customer.

Build versus Buy

Instead of asking whether you want to use WF or some product for your solution. I would recommend another question. Ask yourself whether you want to build a software development project or whether you would prefer to buy software from a vendor. WF is a technology that you could use to build the software yourself and by releasing it as part of the .NET Framework Microsoft has essentially made the build argument stronger. But we also made WF available for ISVs who are building the products you might otherwise consider. And that means they can build on top of it to provide all the higher level features and business value that isn’t in WF.

Related Questions

I’ll try to answer these in later posts. Feel free to comment on this post with other questions about WF you might have.

• How does WF work with process related software products?
• What types of software development is WF best suited to?

VQ On Rule Based System

From Vaqar Khamasani Blog http://vaqark.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7661EE7984438A5A!125.entry?owner=1

 

 

Developing Smart Applications

Historically speaking, there has always been a ‘disconnect’ between developers of Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) and traditional Information Systems (IS). The primary reasons for this ‘disconnect’ is due to the different development lifecycles and programming paradigms being employed by the two respective genres.  The developers of KBS have primarily preferred declarative programming languages, whereas procedural programming languages have been used by software engineers developing traditional applications.

However, with the availability of a declarative programming environment as an integral component of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), the gap between the two forms of systems development will become narrower, which will in turn facilitate and accelerate the development of new generation of smart applications.

Declarative programming has always had less of a mindshare amongst the traditional software developer community who have been more accustomed to learning and using procedural languages. The notable exceptions are those individuals that have been exposed to developing KBS and have indulged in creating systems using Expert System Shells with Inference Engines like CLIPS, etc.

A declarative programming language is a language in which one codifies knowledge and asserts facts, but most importantly, it does not require the developer to specify how the facts must be utilized. This is in sharp contrast to procedural languages in which not only the facts need to be specified but how they will be put to use by the system also needs to be specified. Examples of procedural languages are all the common programming languages such as Visual Basic, C#, Java, etc.

Hence, a declarative programming language only requires that a developer specify all the known and relevant facts. Subsequently, the order in which those represented facts are utilized is dynamically determined by an Inference Engine which is typically a major component of all declarative programming environments. A much known example of a declarative programming language is Prolog in which most of the knowledge is represented as logical statements and the in-built Inference Engine automatically uses rules of deductive logic to infer new knowledge from asserted facts.

Declarative languages are generally preferred over procedural languages for developing KBS since much of research also indicates that humans store sizable chunks of knowledge in declarative form. Hence, a typical knowledge elicitation task for developing KBS revolves around extracting the declarative knowledge of the experts and representing them in the form of rules which are then put to use by the Inference Engine.

Unfortunately, because of the difference in development and programming paradigm to create a KBS as opposed to a traditional Information Systems, the two types of systems are usually created in isolation from each other utilizing different developer tools and platforms. This isolated development approach has greatly limited the possibility of designing and developing applications that are able to provide timely and meaningful Information, as well as having embedded expert-level subcomponents to support the key operational and business requirements.

With the availability of Forward Chaining Inference Rule Engine and a comprehensive declarative programming environment as part of Windows Workflow Foundation, it will become possible to seamlessly develop new, integrated and very smart applications

After Seminar Resources

MSServerSide.NET seminar on “Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)” was conducted successfully at Mohd Ali Jinnah University (MAJU) Karachi, Pakistan on 25th Aug 2006. The Seminar presentation  can be downloaded free of cost from http://rapidshare.de/files/30680823/Introduction_to_Windows_Workflow_Foundation.ppt.html .

 

Windows WorkFlow Foundation Lets talk about Transparency

[PPT] Using Workflow in Web Applications

 

Altough i miss the Web Cast "Using Workflow in Web Applications By Israel Hilerio And Paul Andrew" , I able to get the presentaion here it is

   

http://f6.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/0HZ1Q5M6X77w2ilfF2K0mb1EWxndefgkR8ONYAKxy2rEAxJ4Vp0cwRjckLnW0eCMTqjrJNE5hLdw5J4rshRqzQ/WorkFlows%20/WWF%20and%20Web%20App.ppt

 

Enjoy!

Workflow enabled ASP.NET WebCast on Tomorrow 10th Nov 2005

 

Israel Hilerio is presenting a webcast on this topic tomorrow morning at 10am PST.  Sign up now to reserve a space.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032285938&EventCategory=4

After the event the above link will take you to the recording of the session.  View all the Windows Workflow Foundaiton webcasts here.

It gona be cool as they will also showing pageFlow ….

 

 

Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2005 RTM

 Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1.2 just got released copuple of days back.  As described on the download page, this release is primarily as a pre-requisite for certain parts of Office "12" beta 1.  In terms of functionality there’s no difference between Beta 1 and Beta 1.2 but they require different versions of the .NET Framework.

• Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1 requires the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2
• Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1.2 requires the .NET Framework 2.0 RTM

The upside is if you now have Visual Studio 2005 RTM you can use this download to try out Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 1.  Also with this release you can see the workflow runtime is separated from the SDK and tools in two downloads.

 

Great Stuff

Windows WorkFlow Foundation

 

Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow-enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a Microsoft® WinFX® name space (System.Workflow), an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently as Beta) for both client and server versions of Windows. Windows Workflow Foundation supports a wide range of scenarios including workflow within line-of-business applications, user interface page flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite workflow for service-oriented applications, business rule-driven workflow and workflow for systems management.

 

Here are the Links that you might find intresting

 

WWF Technical Forum

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http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=122&SiteID=1

 

WWF DownLoad Page

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http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e27aa8dc-a029-4836-ac59-6b4805df42fa&displaylang=en