Book Image

Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 Cookbook

By : Andrew Zhu
Book Image

Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 Cookbook

By: Andrew Zhu

Overview of this book

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 (WF) is a significant part of .NET Framework 4.0. WF makes workflow technology available to every single programmer that uses the .NET Framework 4.0. It is easy to create long running and distributed programs using WF with the right knowledge. With this book, you will discover that working with workflows is easy. This book provides both step-by-step recipes and relevant background information. It covers all the important aspects of Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0. The best thing about this book is that all recipes are based on real-world experiences of Andrew Zhu. Andrew is a global WF and BizTalk technology support engineer for Microsoft. This book covers everything you need to know, when working with workflows. Get to grips with flow control activities, messaging, and transaction processes with easy to understand steps followed by explanations. You will quickly learn to use collection and custom WF activities and WF services.You will see recipes that illustrate integration of Windows Workflow with other applications such as WPF, ASP.NET, WCF service.Lastly, you will discover how easily you can customize W4 Designer with WF rule engine and others.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Foreword
Preface
Index

Introduction


The Flow is the center of workflow itself, and how to control the Flow is what we will see in this chapter. WF is a lot like an imperative programming language such as C# when it comes to flow control; we have many similar concepts in WF4 such as "if-else", "foreach", "switch", "try-catch", and so on. Additionally, there are some other flow control activities that enable us to control workflow easily and efficiently such as the Parallel activity, Pick activity, ParallelForEach<T> activity, and so on.

In C#, we use language control key words to control everything. In WF4, this is slightly different. When we are developing a real workflow application, we will still write business logic in .NET code and build it out as DLL files so that we can reuse it everywhere. WF4 has two different types of workflow—Sequence workflow and Flowchart workflow. The famous State Machine workflow will be released in .NET Framework 4.5.