Ryan Vice's Blog

I did a session at Houston’s TechFest yesterday on WF 4.0. Thanks to everyone who came out. For those of you in attendance who’d like to learn more about WF some resources are below.

Code Samples

PluraSight

My code was based on the course material in the PluralSight library. I highly recomend subscribing to this service.

Microsoft

Microsoft has some great samples which I used to help prepare here.

Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 Cookbook

This is a great book that is packed with 70 small samples that can help get you up and running in WF. You can find it on Amazon and also on Packt.

Versioning Workflows

I’d like to apologize for getting some of this information wrong in the course. I had mentioned dynamic update as an option for changing WF logic for running instances but apprarently that was removed from 4.0. This thread on the WF forum has some great recomendations from Andrew Zhu and Matt Milner, two of the best guys in the business. I’ll probably try and put together and blog post on this material eventually.

Resources

This list was taken from Andrew’s post in this thread which has a conversation about why you’d want to learn WF and when it’s appropriate to use it.

Introduction to Workflow 4.0
http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/VS2010/WCFWF/IntroToWF/

To learn more about WF4, read the WF4 document:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd489441(v=VS.100).aspx

To learn how to apply WF4 in real applications, check samples:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd483375(v=VS.100).aspx

To get deep into WF4, follow this blog(go with flow):
http://blogs.msdn.com/flow/default.aspx
and this one (matt’s blog)
http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/default.aspx
And .NET endpoint:
http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint/default.aspx:

If you get any problems, Ask your question in WF4 forum:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wfprerelease/threads

And some new valuable material:

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Overview Wiki
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/windows-workflow-foundation-wf-overview-wiki.aspx

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Screencasts:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/wf-screencasts.aspx

Endpoint tv screen cast:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Endpoint/

Slides

Here are my slides from the session in PowerPoint 2010.

Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation 4

Andrew’s new book on WF 4.0 is out and I was asked to write the forward. Andrew did a great job and I recomend checking out this book if you are getting started with WF 4.0. You can find it on Amazon and also on Packt.