Workflow @ TechEd 2006

The scene: Boston, June 20006

The story: Workflow is going to be out in full force, we've got a ton of great sessions lined up, and we've tried to create a bunch of good chalk-talks for people to attend when they just can't get enough workflow!  Ok, to be specifice, we've got 15 workflow sessions, and another 8 chalk-talks on top of that.  You can't find the chalk-talks from the main site yet, so I'm going to list them below.  When you get to Boston come find us in the Connected Systems (CON) in the developer Technical Learning Center (TLC), which I believe is going to be color designated the blue TLC.  We'll have something that lets you know when you can attend these great sessions. And remember, these aren't recorded, so it's a one time show, you may never be able to catch these presentations again!

CON-TLC206 Monitoring Running Workflows Using the Tracking Service
Presenters: Moustafa Ahmed & Joel West 

In Windows Workflow Foundation, the tracking service keeps log information about workflow events and activity execution statuses. The workflow runtime automatically identifies events related to executing workflow instances and outputs them to a tracking service. This chalk talk will cover the capabilities of the out of box SQL-based tracking service as well as how and why you would build a custom tracking service.

CON-TLC208 Hosting a web application business logic in WF
Presenter: Matthew Winkler 

In this chalk talk we’ll look at ways to leverage WF to handle the business logic in your web application. First, we’ll look at hosting options (in process, exposed via WCF) and then move into a few different patterns for workflow. These will include using WF to manage short lived business logic (from postback to render), participating in long running business process managed by WF, and using the Rules Engine to drive validation and other rules based scenarios. We’ll also discuss security considerations in these approaches as well as listen to how you’re planning on using WF in your web applications.

CON-TLC209 Rehosting of the Workflow Designer
Presenter: Devinder Singh 

Windows Workflow Foundation comes with a workflow designer which you normally use in Visual Studio 2005. The workflow designer component is allowed to be rehosted in your application. This talk will describe how you can add the workflow designer into your application so that your application can create and edit sequential and state machine workflow models. We will cover workflow designer feature integration of activity property binding, the rules editor and using code handlers with your designed workflow models.

CON-TLC302 UI Page Flow by hosting WF in ASP.NET
Presenter: Israel Hilerio 

In a web application the transitions between multiple web pages is often written in code. The business logic deciding which page to send the user to next gets hidden in with the procedural code in the page. User interface page flow is a concept to allow the declarative modeling of page transitions and this can be implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation. This talk will describe the concept in more detail and give you a sneak peak at the advances that Microsoft is planning in this area.

CON-TLC303 The Windows Workflow Foundation Scheduler Service and Transactions
Presenter: Israel Hilerio 

The WorkflowSchedulerService defines how CPU threads can be used by the workflow runtime. Standard ACID transactions are supported in Windows Workflow Foundation through the TransactionScope composite activity. Long running processes that require some compensatory action when an exception occurs are also supported through the CompensatableTransactionScope. This talk will discuss these interesting areas of Windows Workflow Foundation.

CON-TLC304 Understanding Windows Workflow Exceptions, Transactions and Compensation
Presenter: Gerald Walsh 

Windows Workflow Foundation provides a rich set of features to support powerful fault handling, robust Atomic and long-running transactions, and flexible compensation support for failed transactions. This session will examine how to manage exceptions within a workflow, how to use the System.Transactions namespace, how to implement both atomic and long-running transactions, and how to utilize compensation and the compensate activity to recover from faults occurring during a transaction’s execution. Demonstrations will be provided to highlight the features and techniques developers need to know to build resilient and reliable workflow applications.

CON-TLC305 Inside the WF runtime
Presenter: Bob Schmidt 

The WorkflowRuntime is the engine that manages executing workflow instances in Windows Workflow Foundation. It handles events for workflow instances, interacts with services that the host application adds and manages workflow persistence. This talk will drill down into the workflow runtime and give you some insight as to how it works. This will be an advanced talk and you should have some prior exposure to Windows Workflow Foundation prior to attending.

CON-TLC306 Windows Workflow Foundation - Rules Engine Extensibility
Presenter: Jurgen Willis 

The breakout session “Windows Workflow Foundation: Building Rules-Based Workflows” gave an introduction to the rules engine capabilities provided in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In this chalk talk, learn more about the WF Rules extensibility mechanisms, which support more advanced scenarios. See an example of how to externalize rules so that they can be maintained separately from the workflow assembly. In addition, learn how to author and execute rules outside of a workflow. Also, see how you can create custom expression and action types that can be used directly in your rules.