When I first heard about Windows Workflow Foundation, I wasn’t particularly excited. “Workflow” has long been a buzzword used by vendors, product managers, and venture capitalists in mind numbing phrases like: “Our workflow solution will leverage your strategic business assets and put you in the fast lane of the information superhighway”.
Yawn.
Nevertheless, I knew some people who were taking Workflow seriously, so I decided to give the preview bits a try. Workflow is a success. The designer works well – both the user interface and the programming interface are intuitive. For a good description of the feature set, which includes state machine workflows and long running workflows, see David Chappell’s “Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation”.
Here is a code activity that Workflow invokes. It would be nice if the Parameters turned into strongly typed properties.
private void Fetch_ExecuteCode(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
FetchSettings settings = new FetchSettings();
settings.ConnectionString = Parameters["ConnectionString"].Value as string;
settings.LocalDataPath = Parameters["LocalDataPath"].Value as string;
// ...
FetchProcessor processor;
processor = new FetchProcessorFactory.GetConfiguredFetchProcessor(settings);
_files = processor.Process();
}
To kick off a workflow...
private void StartImport()
{
if (!workflow.IsStarted)
{
workflow.StartRuntime();
workflow.WorkflowCompleted +=
new EventHandler<WorkflowCompletedEventArgs>
(workflow_WorkflowCompleted);
workflow.WorkflowTerminated +=
new EventHandler<WorkflowTerminatedEventArgs>
(workflow_WorkflowTerminated);
}
Type importType = typeof(ImportWorkflow);
Dictionary<string, object> parameters = new Dictionary<string, object>();
// ...
parameters.Add("LocalDataPath", Path.GetTempPath());
parameters.Add("ConnectionString", Settings.Default.wfStatsConnectionString);
workflow.StartWorkflow(importType, parameters);
}
OdeToCode by K. Scott Allen
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