Saturday, March 18, 2006
Windows Workflow
Windows Workflow is probably one of the most important technologies to come out of Microsoft since, perhaps Office. It might not seem that way to many people, but as a person who is both a company director and a system developer, I think it's really exciting. At last we have a way of visually representing, managing and controlling the business processes.
At present I am just learning the WWF system, and it's difficult to determine early how to use the system. For example, should I place as much business logic as possible into the code inside each workflow? Or should the workflow be as much of a 'shell' as possible, with interfaces out to external services and minimal code?
At present I suspect the latter will be the correct approach, and make WWF as light as possible and just define the process, with the hard work done in components outside WWF.
As I'm writing an application which may have several different customers, who might want to do similar things (such as credit control) in different ways. So it makes sense that we might have two or three different versions of a workflow process, and we make these modular or pluggable, e.g. through an interface? I will update once I discover this.
At present I am just learning the WWF system, and it's difficult to determine early how to use the system. For example, should I place as much business logic as possible into the code inside each workflow? Or should the workflow be as much of a 'shell' as possible, with interfaces out to external services and minimal code?
At present I suspect the latter will be the correct approach, and make WWF as light as possible and just define the process, with the hard work done in components outside WWF.
As I'm writing an application which may have several different customers, who might want to do similar things (such as credit control) in different ways. So it makes sense that we might have two or three different versions of a workflow process, and we make these modular or pluggable, e.g. through an interface? I will update once I discover this.
