Comment Feed for 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4 (10-4 on Channel 9)

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Pranav Shah — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:01:04 GMT

@Edsilv: Did you try the full screen?

These video are clearer than hulu.com..

PS: Not sure if its needed but I have Silverlight 3.

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:22:03 GMT

WF4 does support the ExternalDataExchange model anymore. Instead you communicate with a workflow by using messages sent over WCF. To exchange messages with a WindowsForm you would use a named pipe binding.

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Nico Grilli — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:53:10 GMT

Hello, i'm testing Wf4 but i don't found "Handle External Event Activity" anyone know where is now? or how is possible interact with workflow from a WindowsForm?

Thanks

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:35:01 GMT

@Emil

Workflows are more than just another way to write code. They bring many capabilities from being able to suspend and resume at some later point (even on a different machine) to being fully instrumented business logic (wait until you see the monitoring episode...)

So target market? Literally anybody who writes business logic.

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:32:43 GMT

@dynamite, @toughnut - beta 1 is coming very soon.

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

rstat1 — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:26:04 GMT

Must have been watching the low res version of this video. I had no issues reading any of the text in the video.

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Emil — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:48:47 GMT

So who exactly is the target market for workflows?

It seems that anyone who can understand this stuff can understand coding it in text. With all of these windows popping up, isn't it more confusing than coding in text? I guess i just don't see the point. On the other hand, it reminds me of the lego visual program designer which even kids can use so maybe it is easier to write programs this way for beginners.

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

toughnut — Fri, 01 May 2009 18:07:47 GMT

My company is just getting started with Workflow and I don't want to start with the old 3.5 stuff. The applications that we will be developing with Workflow 4.0 and WCF will be internal. When will we be able to start playing with VS2010 and the new WF 4.0 stuff? Is there an early adopter avenue or will there be a beta soon?

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

dynamite — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:17:16 GMT

I am looking for new CTP too. When is it going to be out?

Re: Re: Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Matt Winkler — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:11:56 GMT

Tad,

In .NET 3, WF had a custom syntax that was kind of like C# but kind of like VB in order to do expressions in rules. We heard a fair amount of feedback that folks wanted a richer expression story in order to have richer databinding, as opposed to the property + collection indexer support we had in 3.0. In 3.0, for instance, if I have a WriteLine activity, and I want to combine two variables, I can not via data binding. In 4.0, I can simply write Var1.PropOfInterest + " " + Var2.OtherPropOfInterest as the property value.

We knew we didn't want to keep pushing forward with a weird pseudo-syntax and wanted to align with all of the features available in various languages. We've built the system in such a way that we will be able to plug in additonal languages in the future. It just happens that the VB team is ahead of the C# team in being able to support this scenario, right now. Check out the "Future of C#" and "Future of VB" talks from PDC. The compiler services that Anders talks about at the end of his talk are something we'll need to incorporate C# into the WF expression story, and as Paul Vick mentions in his presentation towards the end, the VB team is making this type of funcitonality available in .NET 4.0.

Given that we don't have the capability to use C# today, we made the choice to push ahead and use VB here in order to provide a rich expression authoring experience (intellisense, etc) within the designer. Would you prefer that 4.0 ship with the 3.0 syntax / capabilities and push off being able to use richer expressions until we can land both VB and C# at the same time? The feedback we've gotten generally is that while this isn't ideal, it's a worthwhile tradeoff in order to get richer expressions.

In an ideal world, what would you like to see from expressions in WF?

Just C#
Just VB
VB, C#
Any language that I can run in VS?
Dynamic languages (Ruby, Javascript, Python, etc)
New language?
Process / document centric expressions (XLANG/s, BPEL, XQuery ) ?

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Fduch — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:17:47 GMT

No iterators in VB?
No CTP release after 5 months since the last CTP expired???

Pretty boring, isn't it?

Re: Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

tadanderson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:45:06 GMT

Great... welcome back VBA. The Office team is killing themselves to break the stereotype that office programming is a joke, based on VBA being at the heart of it, now VB syntax will be at the heart of workflow.

Forget 2011…

http://realworldsa.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/goodbyewindowsworkflowfoundationseeyouin2011.htm

See ya never…

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

samov — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:47:16 GMT

The videos are not shot in low res. I think it does a bandwidth check and chooses the quality automatically.

Just download it offline WMV(high) right under the video itself and it will be crystal clear.

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Chris Richner — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:42:49 GMT

shows off more than "just" the topic it's about in a nice and background driven way...

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Charles — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:19:58 GMT

This should be resolved now. The URL for the inline player points to a high res file. Watch it in full screen mode and you'll be pleased.
C

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:09:01 GMT

In WF 3 there was no Try/Catch activity. It had a FaultHandler which was not visible unless you toggled the view.

I agree it might be nice to have the option to have an expanded view inline with everything else and the ability to toggle between expanded and collapsed without drilling down. But that's the deal for now.

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:07:10 GMT

Lacked content? What were you expecting?

This video is based on a draft of the first Hands On Lab for Workflow which is meant to be an introduction so it introduces you to the Workflow, several activities, arguments, expressions and error handling.

There will be several other labs with much greater detail on other aspects of workflow. If the video lacked something I'd like to fix it so it will be more compelling.

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:04:13 GMT

I think you mean the variable "FirstWord".

The build I'm using has some "issues" with Intellisense. You may have noticed that the arguments "Name" and "Greeting" never show up in Intellisense and are flagged as errors (squigilly underline) by the expression editor but they work just fine at runtime. These issues are being fixed and should be gone by Beta 1.

Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Ron Jacobs — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:01:44 GMT

Sorry about the video resolution. When I first published this I set it to show high quality video. For some reason our publishing system republished it about 8 hours later with low quality video. We are trying to get it fixed but if you download the WMV high quality you will be able to read it.

Re: Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Enrique Gonzalez — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:18:22 GMT

ok, I confess; I don't like VB... Not even the expressions, I like Krisw approach better, in the real life or at least on own my experience ,most of the time, business people hand over developer the logic to be implemented.

When are we, simple mortals, will be able to get our hands on it?
I could use something like your VPC ->

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Edsilv — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:53:17 GMT

This is a topic I'm very interested in but it's disappointing when you can't actually read any of the text in the video because it's shot at the wrong resolution. I've noticed this with quite a lot of C9 videos. Surely the point of these things is to be able to read the labels of menu items/buttons that are being used?

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Marcin — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:38:42 GMT

Great presentation!

Another way of wrapping workflow arguments :
http://mnajder.blogspot.com/2008/11/use-expression-tree-to-avoid-string_08.html

It would be great if we could see the whole process with Sequence, TryCatch, While.... activities on the designer surface (as WF3).
mn

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

terrajobst — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:23:29 GMT

Great to see the new WF in action. May be I missed something in the video but why does IntelliSense know at 18:30 the paremeter/field "FirstName"?

Re: Re: Re: Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Matt Winkler — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 02:55:30 GMT

krisw, it's a point in time thing, it's what we'll most likely have for VS 2010 because of some relatively unexciting details, which I can get into if you want. It's our intent that we will have more options in the future.

Re: 10-4 Episode 16: Windows Workflow 4

Weqster — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:43:47 GMT

Well presented, but i agree, lacked content.