On Wednesday evening, 11/15/2006 I delivered a presentation as part of .Net University for the Atlanta Visual Basic Study Group . I spoke on WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) one of the four pillars of new technology in the .Net Framework 3.0 which has been recently released. WF is the the programming model,engine and tools for building workflow enabled applications on the Windows platform.

Workflows are an abstraction of the interaction between people, applications, and business processes. For example, consider the process of submitting an expense report, and all of the steps that are take to approve, reject, update, record, and complete the process A workflow is a series of discrete steps that describes the activities of people and software involved with a business process. There are many challenges to abstracting business processes. Some are long running and may take hours, days, or weeks to complete. They also are often stateful and we must be able to know what state they are in at any point in time. We can interrogate workflows using the Tracking runtime service using either a push (for example a log file) or a pull method (interrogating the current Workflow object).

Here are some of the following things we can do with WF:
1) Create stand alone workflow applications.
2) Implement middle tier components.
3) Create custom applications that expose user defined workflows.

The building blocks of WF are activities. These are units of work that are steps in a worfklow. A workflow is a group of activities that implement all or part of a business process. There are two main types of workflows, sequential and state machines. Workflows can also be used to create rules engines for decision making.

Hopefully this blog post has stimulated your interest. The slides and hands on labs for .Net University can be downloaded at http://www.dotnet-u.com . Have fun!!