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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