The Problem Solver

# re: Workflow 4 and Visual Basic expressions Survey@ Wednesday, January 13, 2010 4:26 AM

It didn't bother me enough to start something like this, but it bothers me enough to complete the survey.

# re: Workflow 4 and Visual Basic expressions Survey@ Friday, January 15, 2010 5:48 PM

To be honest, I'm not convinced yet that workflow 4.0 is on a high enough abstraction level to reach the mindset of a 'business user'. Although another great leap in technolgy and possibilities, in most of my experiences, the business user does not natively explain his disired behavior by entering equations in IT style representation but a grammar native to the country. To give an example, in your referred post you show how to enter a delay. Although the technical implementation "TimeSpan" word is not needed it's still a rather 'programmatic' or military way of denoting a time span. I think the 'business user' would like to say "5 seconds" or "", not "00:00:05". To come to the point of your post, I see the target for this tool, as intended by Microsoft, being the business user. So, however much we as developers like C#, we´re not the intended target audience.

To put things in another perspective, the expressions are part of a larger workflow where way more complex items and vocubularies are required to complete the full desired functionality. If we developers can all create enough GUI's where the 'business users' are only exposed to the expressions in VBA i see no problem. I'm afraid this won't be the reality though.

I seriously suggest to consider CLR languages. Micrsoft might be selling themselfs short by not allowing a scientist to use F# equations in the expression shape.

Heading to survey ;)