Friday, August 14, 2009

Teched 2009: Workflow Foundation 4

I have some good news and some bad news regarding WF. The good news is that the guys at Microsoft have completely rewritten WF. The bad news is that because its a complete rewrite, there is currently no upgrade support from the current WF to WF4. Sorry for those current WF developers. That sucks I know.

I heard some scary statistics from some of the presenters at Teched. Apparently, WF is nice to have in theory but as soon as you try to scale it to a realistic solution then everything starts falling apart and you are faced with some difficult challenges. The major challenge (according to me) is the performance issue. WF currently is between 100 and 1000 times slower than normal .Net code execution!!! That is shocking!!!

The good news is that with the rewrite of WF to WF4 the performance has been kept on par with normal .Net execution. I won't count my chickens until they are hatched however. I will do some serious performance testing before embarking on any new project with WF.

They have also redone the WF designer. They have completely done away with the Code activity which will promote better designed workflows. They have also included a type of nested workflow IDE. This means you can drilldown into activities (such as while loops and if statements) and thus your design surface will not be too cluttered (as it is currently).

Ps. Those guys writing products on top of Workflow Foundation (like K2) - I feel for you.

No comments:

Post a Comment