New Screencast – Using the Persistence Service in WF

Welcome to the fourth week of WF screencasts. This is the last screencast in the WF mini-series; next week, we return to the WCF technology, starting to look at consuming WCF services on your client.

This week, CSD Matt Milner from PluralSight guides you through how to add the standard WF persistence service into a WF program. The persistence service is typically used by .NET developers to allow applications to persist application state (if the application were to crash or be shut down, the state is still preserved) or balance work across multiple processes/servers - both of which can be done without having to do extensive program.

In this particular case, we add the persistence provider to two programs, the first one starts work and closes, and the second picks up the work from the persistence store and continues processing the workflow instance. As we add the persistence store to the two programs, we do it two different ways. In the first program, we add the persistence provider via code; and, in the second one, we add the provider via the configuration file.

As mentioned above, the WF screencasts are a weekly series of Channel9 videos done in conjunction with the folks at PluralSight to help developers new to WF/WCF see how the technology is used. It’s worth noting that Aaron and the PluralSight folks are now offering online training courses (in a format similar to these screencasts) as a compliment to their catalog of instructor-led training courses covering Microsoft connected systems technologies. Their training topics range from .NET v3.5 (including an excellent WF/WCF Double Feature course) to WSS to BizTalk server.