This week I am starting a new series of articles to give you guys more insight in the Windows Workflow Foundation framework. The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a framework which was released last year as part of the .NET Framework 3.0 alongside the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It allows you to model workflows: flows of logical (and easy-to-understand) work units. Here’s a basic example.

The units are represented by blocks, so-called “activities”, you can use by dragging them on your workflow designer. And right there, you get the main advantage of workflows. This methodology of creating a process by assembling logic building blocks together is pretty powerful. Especially when you envision a developer sitting down next to a business guy and interactively building the workflow together with him in just a couple of hours. And this without loosing track of the objective as they are working with small logical blocks.
For example, you can use a Send Email activity without having to know how it is actually sent or which methods you have to use. You just fill in a couple of properties and off you go. The big hick-up, unfortunately, is that there aren’t many blocks to choose from. So, we have to create them ourselves. And this is where the frustration begins. Most of the time the business has these complex rules set up and wants them translated to workflow technology. Creating all of these abstractions of the inner workings to the actual logic they’re producing, can be quite hard and sometimes just plain impossible. Why? Well, we have this framework we have to work around, which has very specific rules and complex, new logic to get code to run. And I’m not yet talking about parallel execution of our blocks.

Another great advantage is its pluggable system of services. When we want to run a workflow, the Workflow Foundation can add services to extend its possibilities. One of the most interesting services already developed, is persistency. It gives us the possibility to have the workflow, its whole instance, being interrupted and saved on a data storage. This way, lengthy processes that are waiting on some user interaction can be cleared from main memory and brought back to execution only when needed!

All in all, Windows Workflow Foundation is quite a nice technology, which can be very powerful. Unfortunately, development is proofing to be quite challenging. This is why I decided to give this series a try to get things cleared up and help you guys with some hints and tips. Hope you’ll like the series. Stay tuned!

Well, this feels strangely familiar. It has been a while, since I’ve last written something. Maybe some of you have read my “notorious” adventures with C++ and OpenGL. I have not yet sorted out whether or not I should leave the old posts (as they are in Dutch), but for the moment, I’ll leave them to be read. But for those of you new here, welcome on my blog.

So, I’m starting all over again. But what is different, you may ask? First thing you may notice is that the blog sports a new design. Bye bye Blix, hello Blogari. And this time, it’s a custom made design, specifically made for this blog. It was kinda hard finding the right one, but I think this design will do just fine for now. I’m still not 100% satisfied with the color scheme, though. Then again, I never am with the designs I make, so let’s just see how this one comes along.

The blog uses the new WordPress engine. (2.3 for those keeping stats) It has a new tagging framework – including a nifty tag cloud – and an update notifcation system for its plugins. So it’s a pretty decent update, I think. I’ve looked into the possibility of using another cms for this blog. Tried some more exotic software such as Joomla and Drupal, but in the end, I just stuck with good old WordPress, as it is great in what is does, namely blogging!

Talking about CMS, it’s a nice intro for the stuff I’ll be blogging about. It’s been more than a year since I graduated at KULeuven. And I found a nice little job at Dolmen, a Belgian IT service provider. A consultancy firm, if you like. And for almost a year now, I’ve been developing SharePoint solutions for all kinds of customers. (WSS 3.0 as well as MOSS 2007) So this is what this blog will be mainly about, sharing my new adventures with SharePoint and analyzing technical issues I come accross. As you may have guessed SharePoint will not be the only subject on this blog, although most ramblings will still involve computer technology.

As a final note, to celebrate this new beginning, I am preparing a series of blogposts covering some issues when designing layouts for SharePoint. Those will be posted as soon as possible.

PS: We are in the middle of a server upgrade (talking about good timing… :p) Yesterday I updated the version on the new server. But there were some technical difficulties. So we reverted back to the old server. So if you post a comment, it’ll likely be gone tomorrow. Just bare with me.

PS 2:  You are now reading the new server