endpoint.tv: Declarative XAML Workflows in WF 3.5

Welcome to the latest video in the weekly WF/WCF Screencast series.

In this short video, CSD MVP Matt Milner from PluralSight guides the viewer through how to use declarative XAML workflows.

In this screencast, Matt demonstrates how to build and run your workflows in XAML; allowing you to express your workflow completely in this XML-based format. He starts off by creating a new WF workflow using the XAML workflow project file, and walks the viewer through the files that are created by this VS project, and how to remove the code behind (.cs file) so that your workflow project will be based soley on a XAML file to explain it. We then work with the workflow in both the XAML/text editor and the WF designer to add the business logic, modify the .NET application to read in and process the XAML file, and run the workflow.

Along the way, Matt then delves into the created XAML file to examine and explain the structure and used namespaces in that XAML file. Matt also explains the impact of starting XAML only workflows - how and why we need to load the XAML file differently, and some additional exception handling that you should add to handle the runtime exceptions that can come with XAML-only workflows (because the workflow isn't being compiled, the validation is happening at runtime).

For additional information on WF, please check out the WF Dev Center on MSDN and the .NET Endpoint team blog. For more information on classes offered by Aaron and the PluralSight folks, check out their catalog of instructor led courses and new online courses that cover a variety of Microsoft technologies, ranging from .NET v3.5 to WSS to BizTalk server.