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In the last two posts 101 and 102 , I went pretty deep in some areas. I want to step back and do some more tutorial stuff. So the first question out of the gate is what is Workflow itself and where might you use it? In a nutshell, a Workflow describes and automates a Business Process. It can be described as a "reactive" program which tends to contain some traits: Workflow declared as a set of Activities Coordinates people and software Has real-world control flow Runs reliably and durably Tolerates dynamic change A Workflow is typically designed by a Process Designer using Business Process Analysis, Modeling, and Definition tools. That Process Definition is fed into a Workflow Management System. The WMS will have Users, Applications and Administrators/Supervisors. The WMS will present that Process Definition visually in some form and launch applications. From looking at workflows, we see that some challenges are present. Unlike non-reactive programs, workflows tend to be long-running and stateful. It may take 20 days for an order to be shipped for instance. There usually needs to be some controls to allow a person to override or skip a step in the workflow. Finally, we must be able to see into the workflow and see what state its in and visualizing control flow. Workflow is used in many scenarios like: Business Process Management (BPM) Document Lifecycle Management (Sharepoint, K2) BizTalk Orchestration Sales Management Line of Business Apps Many others... Enter Windows Workflow (WF). Unlike K2 and Sharepoint, WF is not a Workflow Management system or product. It is instead, a general purpose framework for building workflow into your own applications. It ships as part of the .NET Framework 3.0, and ships with both Vista and Longhorn Server. It is installable on Windows XP SP2 and Win2K3. Since WF is baked into Vista and later systems, and is a general framework, it is a single workflow execution engine for all Windows platforms. Indeed, products like K2, Sharepoint, Read More...
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So, last time around , I left off at the issue about my struggles with the ExternalDataService that ships in WF and purports to be the general mechanism to get data in and out of a workflow. Harry responded that he didn't like EDS and that I get real intimate with the WorkflowQueuingService that low-level communication infrastructure that ExternalDataService builds on top of. I also heard from Matt Winkler in email who pretty much pointed in the same direction, emphasizing that EDS is an abstraction that sits on top of a pretty basic queuing mechanism that you can program against and build on. One is not restricted to HandleExternalEvent, ExternalDataExchangeService but I would have to build the abstraction in the host to route the messages into the queue, and then have activities that wait on the queue. The first point of this post is to make my readers aware of this option and the documented EDS is not the only option for data in/out. One of the other main areas is WCF Integration, which actually can be achieved on top of the WorkflowQueuingService . We (at work) will not be able to use Orcas as our workflow deliverables are by this August and banks will not accept 3.5 for quite some time (if not years). So I have to build my own WCF/WF Integration. The first place I looked was the WCF Activities for WF project on CodePlex . This excellent project by Marcel builds a necessary infrastructure. For instance, there is an base InputActivity class that implements the IEventActivity Interface for event-driven activities. /// <summary> /// Base class for activities that dequeue data from a workflow queue /// </summary> public abstract class InputActivity : Activity , IEventActivity , IActivityEventListener < QueueEventArgs > { That class provides an abstraction over the queues and events. From there, you can derive a WCFInputActivity. It looks like good stuff that I can use. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Financial and Banking Read More...
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As fellow CodeBetter Blogger Richard notes, in his very gracious post , I will be giving two talks on WCF for INETA this coming Monday in Oklahoma City. The deck is being refined once again with my latest Indigo learnings especially as we deploy in Financial Banks. I also hope to have new demos, perhaps integrating with WF! Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , Apache Axis , Financial and Banking , WCF , WF , Windows Workflow , , Software Architecture , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! Read More...
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I don't really know what to call this post. I'm not as good as Palermo in doing 101 posts and I like to talk about the context so anyhow. Plus I'm not just a pretty link-blogger so away we go :). Way back in October, I talked about Re-Hosting the Windows Workflow Designer in our application . So the version that went out of our baseline Concentration product went without any workflow. I have been playing the Agile Architect the last few months scouting out the WF territory to see if we could accomplish our workflow architectural needs with WF. The short answer is Yes. If I had to summarize my months with WF is that WF is very powerful and capable. But a lot of that power comes from the fact that WF is such a general framework capable of being used in many different scenarios on Windows platform. There is no doubt that Microsoft providing such a powerful and flexible framework for developing workflows is so much better than having to develop our own framework, visual workflow designer, and runtime environment. But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Because it is so general, you may have to do a lot of work to develop your domain-specific model and you will have to learn a lot about WF. You will still have to know about Workflow Architectures and deadlocks and all sorts of stuff. There are some in Redmond that seem to promote the view that you can just "drop" WF into your app and presto. One of the feedback items that us Architect MVPs gave the WF team last summit was this was dangerous. People have to be given guidance here. We have to leverage the decades of work that people like Eric Newcomer have already put into this field. People are using to transition UI pages for God's sake. In my original view of things, I thought I would re-host the WF Designer in our CAB Smart Client application giving Collateral Analysts a whole new power to design workflows. I thought, "wow, I can have analysts just drop Margin Calc and Collateral Demand activities Read More...
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In a post on January 25th , I said, "I posted yesterday that we had shipped our Enterprise Collateral Management solution based on our new architecture. As I said, we still have a lot more to do ." I provided a concise list of the methodologies, technologies and tools that we used in our 14 month cycle. To update where we are now, it will be necessary for me to give a little more context. First, when I mention "our company", we are actually a Division exclusively devoted to Collateral Management. This division, in turn is part of a much larger worldwide company that has at least 6 more financial sector products dealing with other aspects of managing risk. That company then, in turn is part of a huge Ratings company. The rest of the products are (mostly) integrated into one suite that we sell. Ours is not. One reason is that the various products have been organized into self-contained product groups. That means that we had our own development, marketing, sales, product and management for just Collateral Management. Five or six weeks ago, our company went through a rather large reorganization that aligned things by a global R&D, global Marketing, etc. I think this is an extremely good thing. Our product is now "owned" by R&D which also owns all the other products that are part of the suite and otherwise and we are detached from product so we can focus on development. We can also look at integrating into the suite and bi-directional learning. One consequence of this is now instead of my boss reporting to a VP of Collateral Management, he reports to a Senior Director in R&D who owns a product out of our large offices in Manhattan. The cool thing is that Josh Madden is a 20 year+ veteran developer/architect like me who has done great things in the Financial area for companies like Reuters. He gets development. The other cool thing is that his other product group also uses a lot of Agile techniques and greatly appreciates our total XP environment. One more thing: Read More...
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