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Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

What’s New in WF4

The significant changes made were necessary to provide the best experience for developers adopting WF and to enable WF to continue to be a strong foundational component that you can build on in your applications. The new framework components are found primarily in the System.Activities.* assemblies while the backwards compatible framework components are found in the System.Workflow.* assemblies.  The System.Workflow.* assemblies are part of the .NET Framework 4 and provide complete backward compatibility so you can migrate your application to .NET 4 with no changes to your workflow code.

Designers

One of the most visible areas of improvement is in the workflow designer. Usability and performance were key goals for the team for the VS 2010 release.  The designer now supports the ability to work with much larger workflows without a degradation in performance and designers are all based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), taking full advantage of the rich user experience one can build with the declarative UI framework.  Activity developers will use XAML to define the way their activities look and interact with users in a visual design environment.  In addition, rehosting the workflow designer in your own applications to enable non-developers to view and interact with your workflows is now much easier.  

Data Flow

In WF3, the flow of data in a workflow was opaque.  WF4 provides a clear, concise model for data flow and scoping in the use of arguments and variables.  These concepts, familiar to all developers, simplify both the definition of data storage, as well as the flow of the data into and out of workflows and activities.  The data flow model also makes more obvious the expected inputs and outputs of a given activity and improves performance of the runtime as data is more easily managed. 

Flowchart

A new control flow activity called Flowchart has been added to make it possible for developers to use the Flowchart model to define a workflow.  The Flowchart more closely resembles the concepts and thought processes that many analysts and developers go through when creating solutions or designing business processes.  Therefore, it made sense to provide an activity to make it easy to model the conceptual thinking and planning that had already been done.  The Flowchart enables concepts such as returning to previous steps and splitting logic based on a single condition, or a Switch / Case logic.  


 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee342461.aspx

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