Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4

Chapter 13. Creating the Business Process

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding how WCF supports long-running business processes

• Creating a declarative workflow in Visual Studio

• Implementing service contracts in XAML and calling external services during the workflow

• Setting up the SQLWorkflowInstanceStore

• Working with Send and Receive activities and correlating outgoing and incoming messages

This chapter is an interactive walkthrough on how to create a business process in Visual Studio 2010 using WCF and workflow services. It starts with defining requirements for a case and shows how to develop the solution step by step. At the end of this chapter, you will have developed the business process, a host for the process, the clients, and other services that interact with this process. This is a complete example so you can test the process and see it in action.

DEFINING THE REQUIREMENTS

Let's take a simple process (see Figure 13-1). This should be a kind of proof-of-concept to learn how to develop workflow processes. It's a classic example of a business process that deals with holiday requests.

Figure 13.1. The holiday request process

A company wants to expose a workflow as a service that receives a holiday request from its employees, waits for approval from a manager, and sends the request to the HR service.

This workflow is started by the request from the employee and the requester receives a reference ...