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MS Announces Windows Workflow Foundation
New product introductions at PDC also include Expression, and Visual Studio Tools for Applications.
by Bill Wagner
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, September 15, 2005
Wednesday's PDC keynote showcased tools that help development teams work at a higher level of abstraction. Microsoft announced Windows Workflow Foundation, the Expression family of design tools, and Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Once again, we will be thinking about our applications a little farther away from the hardware or CPU level.
The keynote, led by Eric Rudder, Microsoft's senior VP of servers and tools, consisted of a series of small demos on many of the initiatives that support this concept: Developers (and graphic designers) will be creating applications by describing them from larger building blocks of content and behaviors.
Windows Workflow Foundation
Windows Workflow Foundation features a workflow engine, programming model, and set of tools for developers to build workflow-enabled applications. It provides a kind of application design surface for workflow modeling, by which you gain a view of your application that displays its workflow. You work at a higher level: The building blocks of the application are sophisticated business actions, not low-level 'if' statements. It will enable developers to envision and create larger, more complicated applications.
Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is, at its core, just another .NET namespace. That means you don't lose the ability to work at the lower levels for your application's core IP. And in fact, your teams can build that logic as WWF components.
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