Monday, June 25, 2007

Workflow Foundation ARCast

I used to be a podcast junkie, but I've been listening to more books lately. Besides .NET Rocks! I've been listening to ARCast for a long time. Well, as I'm trying to catch up on the interesting episodes, I ran across one on Workflow Foundation. Seeing as I am currently reading a book on WF, this seemed like good background noise while I work today.

The reason I'm blogging about it is that one of architects on the WF team that are on the podcast made a high-level statement about what WF can do for applications. I really liked his points, since they are easy to miss when you are studying the plumbing and theory of WF.

So, here they are:

  1. Ability to model your process such that it can react to change.
  2. Ability to model long-running processes.
  3. Ability to track processes and provide visibility into their state.
One could easily drill-down into each of those points, pointing out why the capabilities are important, how WF supports them, and how you can leverage them in your applications. In fact, I may do that in a series of posts over the next couple of days.