In PDC related news: “Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently in beta) for both client and server versions of Windows.”
Does it also handle release shedules? (just curious)
“Does it also handle release shedules? (just curious)”
No that’s not in their roadmap for this time… maybe version 2 or 3 or possibly version 4 beta 3 public…
I think the name “Workflow Foundation” is missleading. It’s makes it sound like bug/job tracking system. But from the looks of it it’s actually something much cooler.
As I understand it, it encourages modeling applications as flow charts where the boxes are things like “E-mail the results to John.” You can write your own custom boxes, but the boxes are interconnected in a 4GL/graphical way. If you write your boxes to be reusable then for a certain class of applications, this design method would be really nice. Most wizards make good canidates for this because they are already broken up into multiple steps (screens) that can be connected together. However, the real question is whether this is useful for other type of applications. For sys admin or backend scrips this could work well. It’s almost like a Unix pipe but with program control instead of data. For user apps other than wizards or mode based systems, it probably wont be as useful. Though it would be interesting if someone figured out how to write something like MS Word in WinFX.
MSFT’s version is probably more featureful, but doesn’t this sound awfully familiar? If you’re just looking for a GUI version of UNIX pipes/inter-app communication, check out Apple’s Automator, which is essentially that.
It doesn’t have a lot of the flow control fanciness “Workflow” probably does — but it does call its scripts “Workflow”s.. 🙂
I think the difference is that Automator is meant to take disparate applications and tie them together in neat ways.
This is more of a programmer’s tool, enabling you to build these applications yourself from small reusable components you’ve written yourself. CRM packages, Debt Collection software, etc.
Automator lives in that “pro-user” space. Graphic designers who aren’t afraid of a little scripting, etc.
MS released something very similar to this back in 2000 when they released the first version of BizTalk…it was called the Orchestration Designer and used Visio to build and connect workflows for exchanging data EDI style…I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to incorporate something like this into a more mainstream product…kudos to them though, MS has always had some incredible developer products.