New CTP Available for Download: WF Migration Kit

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Happy Monday!

It’s an exciting time here as we start ramping up for launch next month. Within the product group, there has been a flurry of activity as they squash their bugs, and the final polish is being placed on the Visual Studio release. In the business group, we’re busy finalizing web content and launch material that you’ll start seeing over the next few months.

On Friday, in preparation of the release of the new Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) runtime in .NET 4 (WF4), the team has released the first public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the WF Migration Kit. The original WF migration guidance documents that we started releasing with Beta 1 are now complimented by a tool that will help you migrate common scenarios implemented using WF from .NET 3.x (WF3).

As quote the first two paragraphs of the migration kit’s user guide:

The WF Migration Kit helps users migrate WF3 (System.Workflow) artifacts to WF4 (System.Activities). The high level goal is to migrate workflow definitions and declarative conditions, but not code (such as workflow code-beside methods). Some WF3 workflows will be fully migratable to WF4, while others will be partially migratable and will require manual editing to complete the migration to WF4.

The WF Migration Kit provides an API as well as a command line executable tool, which is a wrapper around the API. Migrators are included for some, but not all, of the WF3 out-of-box activities. The WF Migration Kit offers an extensibility point so that custom activity migrators can be developed by third parties.

The migration kit is designed to help you get started in the automation and movement of common workflow scenarios. Because most of your logic will be in custom activities, the tool has extensibility points for you to automate the migration of your own custom workflow logic and activities.

The CTP release posted up to CodePlex has been released with the source code, under the .NET Pre-Release Components license. You are allowed to download and modify the code for your personal use for migrating your WF code. While it may be added into the .NET/Visual Studio codebase in the future, please treat it as another tool in your WF tool belt. For customers and ISVs with a lot of WF workflows to migrate, we hope it will be a tremendous help.

Enjoy!

BTW – Keep an eye on the WF Pre-Release CodePlex site; more goodies are coming over the next few months!