Here in this article I tried to throw the light on the new technology of Microsoft newly released .NET version .NET 3.0. Here in .NET 3.0 there are some new concept, one of them, is Window Workflow foundation also named as WWF. Windows Workflow Foundation represents one of the Key technologies in the .NET framework version 3.0. It enables business processes to be expressed graphically and linked directly to business logic. Basically WWF is stands for manage the flow of work in the project.
WWF provides a singles engine to execute the workflow. WWF is an extensible framework from Microsoft to implement workflow based solutions. In simple terms, a workflow is a collection of activities. WWF can be thought of consisting of tools, engine and a model for building workflow applications.
There are two types of workflow:
-
Sequential Workflows Sequential workflow follows the traditional style of thinking.
-
State machine Workflows State machine workflows deal with different states of the workflow.
Some advantages of WWF
In our project there will be many tasks. Then if there is no plan like as which task is using in operation or from where the task is coming, what is the flow of that task in the project; if all of these are not in a plan then the situation can be very critical. Which task is using or will be use or will not be use in future, from window work flow we can find it easily. Window work flow shows the flow of our operation in the site. For doing any work there is flow, mean step by step process. A real benefit of developing Workflows to model processes in our businesses is simplifying complex looking. By making it declarative and explicit, a Workflow definition creates the correct abstraction for the scenario.
Major advantages of WWF.
- Representation of process in a project can be easily defined.
- We can modify at run time
- With WWF we get long running.
How we develop a WWF
Step 1 Create a work flow application to select a workflow model.
step 2 Add activities to this model.
Figure 1.
Here in WWF there can be dozen of activity some of them are.
- Code activity
- Compensate Activity
- Conditional Activity Group
- Delay Activity
- If Else Activity
- Parallel Activity
- Replicator Activity
- Policy Activity
- Invoke web service Activity
- Fault Handler Activity
- While Activity
- Suspend Activity
- Set State Activity
- State Initialization Activity
- Terminate Activity
- Throw Activity
As we seen above, in WWF, a workflow definition consists of Activities. Activities can be single or composite. A composite activity itself comprises of individual activities. A workflow can be thought of as a composite activity. This allows us to call a workflow within a workflow. To implement a custom activity; all we have to do is derive from the Activity class and override the Execute method.
public class ActivityCreate : Activity
{
protected override Status Execute(ActivityExecutionContext context)
{
}
}