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


In a traditional imperative program language such as C#, if one wished to send/receive message to/from a remote location, one was expected to write a lot of code, have thorough knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, .Net Remoting, Web Service, and so on. Starting from .NET Framework 3.0, Microsoft launched WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). By using WCF, messaging has become an easy and flexible task. WF4 takes advantage of WCF and provides some out of the box messaging activities. In this chapter, we will focus on the built-in messaging activities shipped by WF4.

In the case of service host, though we can use the Local Web Development Server shipped with .NET Framework4.0 as the WCF host, I personally recommend the real IIS7.0 or IIS 7.5. For detailed IIS installation steps, we can refer to the documents from http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/85/installing-iis-7/.

To make sure our application has permission to open a WCF HTTP port, we should run Visual Studio 2010 as administrator.