Microsoft rewrites Workflow Foundation from the scratch

In a keynote at the PDC 2008 conference the speaker Kenny Wolf announced that Microsoft is rewriting Windows Workflow Foundation from the scratch. The basic concepts will be retained but the implementation and all components will change fundamentally. It will be shipped with .Net 4.0 and will not be compatible with current Workflow Foundation Code.

One of my next articles in this blog would have been titled "Why I do not believe in Windows Workflow Foundation". I think I can skip this article now, as Microsoft obviously has come to the same conclusion.
First of all. If you want to do workflow driven development, the current Microsoft strategy is a mess in itself. Do I use Workflow Foundation, Workflow Foundation for Sharepoint, Biztalk or what? Currently we have 3 products offering more or less the same. But even even if you get behind the point of simply chosing Workflow Foundation things do not lighten up.
If you look closer at the word "Workflow" you will soon encounter some philosophic problems.
What is a workflow? Are we talking about program level workflow, about technical workflows or do we even talk about interactive workflows, are we talking about business processes, do I store my business object in the workflow object, when do I use sequential workflows or state machines....
Workflow Foundation fails to answer any of these questions and hence gives you no clear strategy what WF is aimed at. For me it felt like getting a tool box tossed at my head with a sticker on it saying "Find out what it's good for".
To the point where I used Workflow Foundation in technical workflow, things where working out but when I got to the point where I tried to implement an interactive workflow with just 4 states things were getting messy.
The whole communication concept with workflows is a mess, the Workflow controller is unbearable slow, the workflow designer shipped with Visual Studio 2008 was ***unusable*** before service pack 1. If you want to user persistence or tracking you end up rebuilding the database frequently, because errors come up that can not be solved differently.
The WCF-WF integration example published by Microsoft definitely belongs into the Hall of Shame. A calculator that needs a Start() and Stop() Method before/after it does calculate something. Jeeeez. Who dared publishing something like that? It clearly shows that both techniques where designed independently and were never designed to interact.

But with the new approach am looking forward to see what the result will be. I definitely believe that the future of development will be workflow driven. Software definitely needs to get to the point where my business process reflects in software. There and only there I benefit from workflow driven development.


"In einem Vortrag auf der PDC 2008 offenbarte Sprecher Kenny Wolf, dass Microsoft die Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) noch einmal von Grund auf neu schreiben wird. Die Konzepte einer Laufzeitumgebung, die aus einzelnen verbundenen Aktivitäten bestehende Workflows ausführt, bleiben zwar bestehen. Auch die Workflow-Dienste wie Persistierung und Ablaufverfolgung wird es weiterhin geben.
Die Implementierung und alle Bausteine (Laufzeitumgebung, Aktivitäten und Dienste) werden sich jedoch in der kommenden Version fundamental ändern. Die neue Ausgabe wird nicht mehr kompatibel sein zu den derzeit am Markt verfügbaren Versionen." (Heise)