Real World .NET 4, C#, and Silverlight®: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs

12

The WF Programming Language

by Vishwas Lele

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 (WF 4) is a programming language based on higher-level abstractions suitable for implementing business processes. Even though the WF 4 programs are likely to be authored using graphical tools (such as the Workflow Designer), developers must understand the fundamentals of the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) based declarative syntax to make the most of the features offered by WF 4.

This chapter starts with the notion of Activity as a basic construct of a WF 4 program. In this chapter, you learn about language fundamentals, including arguments and variables, scoping rules, expression support, and flow control constructs. In addition, you learn ways to extend the WF 4 framework by building domain-specific custom activities. Finally, this chapter examines hosting WF 4 programs in Windows AppFabric.

This chapter is designed for .NET developers who want to incorporate WF 4 into their solutions to ease the authoring of business processes. This chapter assumes that you have a good understanding of C# and .NET.

You can download all the code snippets illustrated in this chapter as part of the download package for this book located on this book's companion website ( www.wrox.com ).

GETTING STARTED

The key objective of any line-of-business (LOB) application is to implement the underlying business processes. ...