Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Write Connected, Service-Oriented Solutions

Many business applications involve specific processes, or workflows, around documents, records, and related data. These business processes typically involve staged review and approval by business personnel; they might also require communication between various systems. A business process is also typically long-running—meaning the process is not a simple, single execution but rather a multistep process that has to “wait” before moving to the next step.

Building these processes into business application typically required a lot of custom development work with little guidance, or it meant tying your application to third-party tools. Web services helped, but developers lacked an easy way to build them ...