Practical Workflow Services Peter Goodman

Agenda  Why Workflow?  The Workflow Runtime  Workflow Services  Windows Server AppFabric  Demo

Why Workflow?  Visual programming model  Declarative  Highly Customizable  Long running processes  Human based  Time based  Asynchronous

The Workflow Runtime Activity Model  An Activity is the atomic unit of composition in a workflow  Pass data into an activity via Arguments  Store data in Variables  An activity with no parent is a Workflow

 Each activity is scheduled by the runtime  Each activity execution produces an instance  Bookmarks pause execution and await some external influence  Thread, process, machine agile The Workflow Runtime Activity Execution

 Persistence stores the state of the workflow  Tracking raises message events from workflow activities  Custom extensions The Workflow Runtime Extensions

 Send and Receive activities  WCF Infrastructure  Each workflow definition is hosted as a WCF service  Correlation is used to find an instance of a workflow definition and the appropriate bookmark Workflow Services

 IIS administration console UI  Workflow Management Service  Wakes up instances  Handles instance control requests  Event Collection Service  Forwards tracking events to Monitoring Store Windows Server AppFabric

Demo The Approval Workflow

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