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

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

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

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.