BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March Community Technology Preview is released

As I predicted last month, the March 2007 CTP for our BPEL activities for Windows Workflow Foundation was released today.

BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is an add on for Windows Workflow Foundation in the .NET Framework 3.0. BPEL is the Business Process Execution Language and this download is an unsupported Community Technology Preview (CTP) for using this technology with WF. The download, which is aimed at software developers, provides import and export tools for BPEL and includes WF activities representing BPEL for the WF designer in Visual Studio 2005.

This release reinforces how WF is extensible and not dependant on any specific modeling language for its declarative modeling approach. Others in the community are encouraged to build activity sets that represent other process modeling languages that suit their needs. By supporting declarative modelling with WF in an extensible way Microsoft is providing .NET Framework developers with a familiar code oriented approach that can also be higher level and more productive.

You can download it now from MSDN and to make the best use of it I'd recommend you also get these. You will need Windows Vista, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 to try this.

  1. the .NET Framework 3.0
  2. the Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0 SDK
  3. Visual Studio 2005 Profesisonal or better
  4. the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation

This technology is planend for release at the end of calendar year 2007 and we look forward to your feedback to help improve it.

BPEL for WF activities in Visual Studio 2005 tool bar