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The whole persistence model has changed quite a but for WF4. The persistence class out of the box is called SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and as the name suggests it saves workflow data in either SQL Server 2005 or 2008. It is based on the InstanceStore...
Flowcharts are a nice addition to Windows Workflow Foundation 4. They allow for a lot of pretty complex behavior that is hard to do in a sequential workflow. In WF 3 we used to model these complex behaviors as state machine workflows. That worked but...
When using Windows Workflow Foundation 4 you often need to enter expression in some activity property. The new thing is these expressions are all in the Visual Basic dialect regardless of what language you project is in. So when developing a project in...
Creating parameters for a workflow is quite easy to do in WF 4. Just open the arguments tab in the workflow and add each input or output parameter you need and the required type. Now in WF 3 passing data to a workflow was done using a Dictionary<string...
In the previous blog posts, here , here and here , I demonstrated how to use WCF from WF4. This same some more about sending multiple messages to the same workflow, AKA Workflow Correlation. One of the ugly parts of Windows Workflow Foundation...
In the previous two blog posts ( here and here ) I showed how to create and expose a Windows Workflow Foundation 4 workflow via WCF and have both a workflow and a regular C# client work with it. But the parameter and return value where real simple with...
In a previous blog post I described how to use the WorkflowServiceHost and host a workflow with a Receive activity that waits for WCF messages. I also added a WF4 client that called the service and received a response. However a lot of clients out there...
There are several ways to use WCF in combination with Windows Workflow Foundation 4. The two can be combined inside of a XAMLX file as Ron Jacobs describes here . Another option is using the WF4 Receive and SendReply activities and hosting the workflow...
One thing that has completely changed in Windows Workflow Foundation is the way we work with data in a workflow. In WF 3 we used properties to store data. We could use regular .NET properties but most of the time dependency properties where the...
In my previous post I showed how to use an AsyncOperationBlock to do some basic asynchronous work in WF 4. As I mentioned this was for relatively short lived asynchronous operations as the workflow could not be persisted and unloaded while this asynchronous...
The whole asynchronous execution model in WF 4 has changed quite a bit from WF 3. Not really a surprise as this one of the areas where WF 3 was really hard to work with. Below is a very simple example. It does nothing useful, it’s only task is...
The question of what Windows Workflow Foundation version 4 means for developers currently developing using WF recently came up. As I mentioned before WF 4 is a complete rewrite and doesn’t use any of the existing WF 3 classes. The design of WF...
Passing parameters into a workflow is similar in WF4 as it was in WF3. In both case a Dictionary<string, object> is passed in when creating the workflow instance object. Alternatively when using the WF4 WorkflowInvoker you can pass it into the Invoke...
With WF3 there was a central workflow runtime environment called the WorkflowRuntime and used to manage the lifetime of workflow instances. In WF4 this central class no longer exists and we manage individual workflows. To compare the two, this is what...
As you may have heard Windows Workflow Foundation 4 is not an upgrade from Windows Workflow Foundation 3 (or 3.5). The version numbers might suggest that the previous version was quite mature but in fact it refers to the version of the .NET framework...
Last week lots of MVP, myself included, where in Redmond visiting Microsoft on our yearly MVP pilgrimage. The MVP Summit is always a great event. Not only do we get to talk to the MS team members who actually design and build all the software we love...
In the next version of workflow we are going to leave the XOML extension behind us. Creating workflow's or custom activities using markup will create a XAML file instead of the now familiar XOML file. That doesn't mean we are moving to exactly...