I heard from a friend that Microsoft rewrote all the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) again and changed everything was in .Net 3.5.
Is that true?
And what about what we learned about WF in 3.0 and 3.5?
+10
A:
The last thing I had heard about WWF, was that through some form or action they got renamed to WWE. And now they have this WWE Raw on Monday nights. I realize this doesn't help you out, but I couldn't resist.
Jordan S. Jones
2009-05-31 16:02:16
+1 for gumption and gusto.
Eric
2009-05-31 16:06:15
'Tis a joke, Amr. In the US, there was a big fiasco around how the WWF needed to change their name, since they had co-opted the World Wildlife Foundation's use of it. When MS came out with WWF, we all had a giggle.
Eric
2009-05-31 16:53:04
ok, Sorry didn't understood it fast :)
Amr ElGarhy
2009-05-31 17:01:42
Nicely done! -Is there away to get around the stupid 15 character min?
Esteban Araya
2009-06-01 19:24:45
+8
A:
According to this article:
http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2009/01/01/windows-workflow-changes-direction.aspx
Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 is a "bottom-up rewrite with entirely new thinking...WF 3.0/3.5 will remain part of the framework and will run side by side with WF 4.0. This lets you manage the transition at a time that fits your organization's broader goals."
...which is code for, "We know we just screwed up your programming model, but we have a long term strategy, so we hope you will forgive us."
The article goes on to say that
The gains are enormous: custom activities take center stage, and authoring them is much simpler; workflows are entirely declarative; and there are three workflow flow styles that you can combine seamlessly. It's possible that you could see a 10-fold improvement in the time required to create and debug workflows, in addition to 10- to 100-fold runtime performance improvements.
The change is not without its detractors. In this article at DotNetKicks, the author states that "Microsoft is seriously damaging the Dot Net developer community and adoption in the industry with these half baked product releases and abrupt about-faces after shipping."
Which is why I generally wait for the 2.0 or 3.0 version of Microsoft technologies, although I made an exception for ASP.NET MVC.
Robert Harvey
2009-05-31 16:03:57
Its worth mentioning that they called the initial WWF 'lightweight' too. Anything W*F is anything but, and instead of fixing and enhancing basics like JIT, WinForms rendering, and rendering in general on previous OS version. they just keep piling on bloat after bloat. It's simply not in their interest to keep things good, decent and stable, but they'll advocate new promises every-single-time. Congratulations to them, but things like that make people walk away over time, and away from lock-in for sure.
rama-jka toti
2009-05-31 16:31:36
What about the jitter needs fixing or enhancing? And WinForms rendering was improved--its called WPF. And increasing the number of frameworks available to use is NOT bloat. You don't want to use WF? Don't use it. Go look up the definition of "bloat". Also, saying that its not in their interest to keep things good, decent and stable has to be about the stupidest thing I've heard. They profit from having a bad, unstable platform? On its face its ridiculous. Please, keep this kind of nonsense on /.
Will
2009-05-31 17:05:31
A:
That's what the word on the street is. And on the internet. 3.0 and 3.5 will be deprecated, but still available.
Eric
2009-05-31 16:05:55
A:
Is this change not in Visual Studio 2010 beta 1? Download it, find out, and tell Microsoft what you think of it.
John Saunders
2009-05-31 16:28:08
+1
A:
We found the workflow product to be difficult to wrap your head around when it came time to pass data in and out. Scott Allen had a series of articles that did a good job describing the process, but still this was not at an easy task.
David Robbins
2009-05-31 17:12:25
Are you talking about 3.5 or 4.0? As seen above, 4.0 is a rewrite and redesign - most of what you learned in 3.0/3.5 is out the window for 4.0.
John Saunders
2009-06-18 05:29:00
3.5 What sucks is that what we've learned / experimented with in respects to WF and SharePoint is now in question. In some cases we've scrapped WF and used Stateless from Nicholas Blumhardt. With Stateless we had a State Machine incorporated into our app with in a half hour. WF State Machine was almost 2 days.
David Robbins
2009-06-18 11:03:55