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• Speaking at VSLive! in San Francisco April 1-3.

  I am going to be giving two talks and a workshop at VS Live! in San Francisco. The first talk is an "Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation" where I explain both the business reasons why Microsoft developed Workflow Foundation as well as the technical fundamentals. This talk will help you understand not only how to build workflows, but when it makes sense to do so and when to use some other technology. The second is "Workflow Services Using WCF and WWF" . WCF allows you to encapsulate business functionality into a service. Windows Workflow Foundation allows you to integrate these services into long running business processes. The latest version of the .NET Framework (3.5) makes it much easier to use these technologies together to build some very powerful business applications. On Thursday I will give a whole day tutorial on Workflow Foundation where will dive into the details of how to use this technology to build business applications. If you haven’t already registered for VSLive San Francisco, you can receive a $695 discount on the Gold Passport if you register using priority code SPSTI . More at www.vslive.com/sf Other speakers will talk about VSTS, ALM, Silverlight, AJAX , .NET Framework 3.0 & 3.5, SharePoint 2007, Windows WF, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and much more. Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 12:24 PM from Thoughts on Software Development | 0 Comments Filed under: All;Microsoft .NET;SOA;Software Development;Workflow

• Using the WF Rules Engine Outside of a Workflow

  The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) ships with a Policy Activity that allows you to execute a set of rules against your workflow. This activity contains a design time rules editor that allows you to create a set of rules. At run time, the Policy Activity runs these rules using the WF Rules engine. Among other features, the rules engine allows you to prioritize rules and to set a chaining policy to govern rules evaluation. The rules engine uses a set of Code DOM expressions to represent the rules. These rules can be run against any managed object, not just a workflow. Hence, the mechanisms of the rules engine have nothing to do with workflow. You can actually instantiate and use this rules engine without having to embed it inside of a workflow. You can use this rules engine to build rules-driven .NET applications. I gave a talk at the last Las Vegas VSLive! that demonstrates how to do this. The first sample in the talk uses a workflow to demonstrate the power of the rules engine. The second and third samples use a very simple example to demonstrate how to use the engine outside of a workflow. Two problems have to be solved. You have to create a set of Code DOM expressions for the rules. You have to host the engine and supply it the rules and the object to run the rules against. While the details are in the slides and the examples, here is the gist of the solution. To use the rules engine at runtime, you pull the workflow rules out of some storage mechanism. The first sample uses Read More... Posted Wednesday, November 14, 2007 2:23 PM from Thoughts on Software Development | 0 Comments Filed under: All;Microsoft .NET;SOA;Software Development;Workflow