In a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading back up to Colorado to do some planning and brainstorming with the Thought Ascent HQ guys and also to speak at the Denver chapter of IASA.

The topic: Workflow Systems.

I spoke at the RMTT back in February about Workflow, specifically Windows Workflow 3.5 (you can still find the slides and code here, btw).

This talk will be nothing like that one.

Different audience, different goals.

Here’s the abstract if you don’t believe me:

Workflow Systems: Myths, Truths and Wishful Thinking

"If workflow is simply about the coordination of work, why is it such a point of contention for most technologists? Do Workflow systems really enable a Business Analyst to change a production process, or are they a waste of time and resources, not to mention a problem that a solid developer could solve with a hundred lines of code? The goal of this talk is to demystify the idea of "workflow," and to discuss what place, if any, a Workflow system might have in your problem domain. We'll discuss Workflow Systems by example with Microsoft's Workflow Foundation tools (3.x and 4.0) and explore popular, low-ceremony options for doing "workflow" (NServiceBus, MassTransit, etc). We'll end the session with an open discussion on workflow tools and collaboratively craft some tactical recommendations on when and why to use workflow in your organization."

So not so much about WF as it is about Workflow in general. The aspects that are about WF don’t make the assumption that WF is a useful tool, or even a good solution, hence the time spent on other options like NServiceBus and MassTransit.

Look for the slides and code to be posted here shortly before or after the talk, along with a couple of follow-up posts (perhaps even a series) that will dive deeper into the main points from my talk.

And if you’re in Colorado, I hope to see you there (click here for meeting details, times and a map)!

Well, the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta has come and gone, and I think the event was a big success. There was a great turnout, and some really useful sessions.

I was pleased to have a full house in my WF talk, and I hope that it was a useful time for those that chose to listen to me drone over the other available options. There was some good interaction and good questions, both during and after the talk.

If you were there, I'd love to hear your feedback, good or bad. I can take, and I'm always looking for tips on how a technical talk can be more useful. If you have unabashed praise, I like that too.

If you would like to have the slides, I've embedded those below, or you can download them here. I have some notes of many of the slides if you're interested in more detail than I shared in the presentation. There are also a few slides at the end on .NET 4.0 improvements to WF that I didn't get to during the talk.

If you would like the code and demos I used during the presentation, you can find everything in a single Zip here. Most everything you need to run the demos should be here, but you will need to create the persistence and tracking databases if you want to use those pieces. Also, you'll need to have MSMQ installed and running on whichever machine you plan to use for these demos. There's a Powershell script to create the queues in the ConsoleWorkflowServiceHost project if you want to try out the MSMQ features.

There's also some unit tests if you want to try things out independent of the web app. You'll need to stage some data, but that's pretty easy. You'll notice that I also added a Test file to test the Custom WF activities I created for this demo separate from the WF itself. This is something I only mentioned in passing in the talk, but it's worth checking out as it's a useful way to really test your custom activities.

If anything else is gnarly, feel free to drop me a comment here or an email and I'd be happy to help you out.

If you've read this blog for any length of time where I've posted regularly, you'll know that I'm a pretty big wonk for composition, Composite Apps and all things assembled and reused over coding from scratch.

So it should be no surprise that I'm quite a fan of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), the Chico Marx of the .NET Framework, underappreciated for it's elegance, simplicity and power to fundamentally change the way that applications are built in the future. Wait, that last part doesn't quite apply to a lesser-known Marx brother, but you get the idea.

I've been interested in WF (If you hear me speak about it, notice that I will never, ever call it "Dub-F." Can't do it.) from the beginning, and have spent the last four months swimming in the deep end with WF, building some key pieces of an integration layer for a payment processing system that Thought Ascent has been working on for some time. Over that time, I've discovered that WF really does have all of the potential I suspected it did, and then some.

WF is a platform that will change the way we look at building applications, and I think that WF is a great example of the kinds of technologies that will move us closer and closer to true composition of applications over the next 5-7 years. Of course, being a Workflow platform released in concert with a universal framework for building connected systems (WCF) and the UI framework of the future (WPF) sort of makes Workflow Foundation like the third member of Destiny's Child. Those other technologies were game changers from day one. WF has an uphill battle to fight for recognition and adoption, but I believe it's the game changer of the future.

Not that it's being ignored, I just think it's been undervalued in the past, typically met with comments from developers and architects like "I get how it works, I just don't see what it's for"or "what does this give me that I can't do myself with code?"

But I see that tone changing, with Microsoft putting a better and better case around Workflow though integration with key technologies, along with richer complimentary services and tighter integrations with WCF.

So why am I telling you all this?

As you may or may not know, the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta is coming up in Denver on February 21st. This event will bring together several experts in the world of .NET, SQL and Windows, along with a few wannabees like myself who will present on just about anything you could hope to hear about in a developers conference. And there will be some heavy hitters to be sure: Scott Hanselman, Paul Neilsen, Rob Bagby and others. I'm not worthy...

If you hadnt't guessed from the first paragraphs of this post, I'll be speaking on Windows Workflow Foundation. Here's the abstract for the talk:

The Future of Work and Workflow

Since .NET 3.0, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) has lived in the shadow of its flashy framework companions WCF and WPF. Yet from the start WF has been, at its core, about new ways of creating durable applications and composable units of work, both of which have the potential to change the way that developers assemble solutions. In this talk, Brandon will cover some of the highlights and recent enhancements to WF (Creating workflow services with WCF and WF, Workflow Persistence and Tracking), tips and tricks for advanced workflow scenarios (using MSMQ with workflow services, custom activities, etc.), and a preview of some upcoming Workflow features in the 4.0 Framework.

If you're close to Denver and haven't signed up yet, you can sign up at www.rmtechtrifecta.com. And if you're planning on coming, drop me a line. It should be a fun day.

And if you're not planning on coming, look for slides and code here over the next few weeks.

At work today, I gave a 40 minute presentation on Ajax, ASP.NET "Atlas," and what we can do to prepare ourselves for the changing world of web development. I presented the talk in MindManager, which actually has a spiffy Presentation Mode, and wanted to make it available to anyone else. So, click the link below to get my MindMap presentation on Ajax and ASP.NET "Atlas." The license on the map is the same as this blog: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5, so feel free to pass the map around, post it on your site, or link back to me. And if you have any comments or criticisms on my presentation or interpretation of the facts, feel free to post them here. I'll be the first to admit that it (the presentation) and I (Brandon Satrom) are far from perfect. Enjoy! Building AJAX Applications using ASP.NET "Atlas" MindMap (460 kb) If you're new to MindManager, you've got a couple of options for consuming this map. You can download the viewer here or you can use the browser plug-in, which can be found here. Ajax, ASP.NET "Atlas", Web2.0 Update: If you're using IE, you'll notice that your browser will tell you that this Map file is actually a .zip. It's just not true, but IE seems to be confused. If you "Save As..." and rename the extension from ".zip" to ".mmap," the Map should open just fine. Sorry for any confusion...