The following is an illustration accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.
Developers create and debug Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) workflows with a set of tools hosted in Visual Studio 2005. The illustration shows the two main panes of the WWF Workflow Designer. The left pane lists core WWF workflow building blocks, which are referred to as activities; activities comprise the units of work in a workflow. The right pane is a design surface: developers assemble workflows by dragging and dropping activity shapes onto the design surface, connecting them graphically as shown, and configuring them with other tools in the Workflow Designer (not shown).
WWF will ship with a base library of general purpose activities. The left pane shows a partial list of the activities in this library, which contains activities for expressing and evaluating business rules, communicating with other software, and basic programming constructs. For example, the InvokeWebService activity allows a workflow to call a Web service while InvokeMethod is used to call available functions in the application containing the workflow; the IfElse activity executes one of several possible groups of activities depending on the result of some logical condition; the Code activity is an empty container into which developers place custom code.
