VBUG Midlands: An introduction to workflow programming

Workflow technology provides the following advantages: • Increased developer productivity – workflows help developers to visualize the process of a real world activity and can implement it easier. Graphical workflows help to simplify complex business processes – which if implemented in part by using procedural code would require a large amount of code. • Workflow technology adds value to activities • Long running and stateful behavior – using workflows enable processes that run for a long time to be remembered and ran through to completion correctly even though they started a long time ago • Flexible flow control – workflows allow the flow of a process to be much more flexible then simple flow diagrams, etc. They allow steps to be overridden and skipped while keeping the overall process intact • Transparency – visualization of real world activities through workflows allow all parties to see exactly how the process works and all the steps involved which helps to keep the process running correctly Going to talk about • What a workflow is • Why use WF • Advantages of WF • What is coming next with .net 4