A common requirement is to have applications share data with other programs. Although there are interfaces available to work with, for example, Microsoft Excel data files, this approach is generally complex, involves a fair amount of overhead, and requires that support libraries accompany your application

Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 1 of 7): Workflow in Windows Applications (Level 100)
This webcast is a code-focused introduction to developing workflow-enabled Microsoft Windows platform applications. We cover the basics of developing, designing, and debugging workflow solutions. Gain the knowledge and insight you need to be confident choosing workflow for everyday applications.


Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 2 of 7): Simple Human Workflow Using E-mail (Level 200)
Have you thought about how you might apply the workflow concept to e-mail? In this webcast New Zealand based regional director, Chris Auld, leads attendees through a simple worked example of the use of SMTP e-mail as part of a workflow solution. Chris demonstrates how to create custom activities to query Active Directory to retrieve user data, send e-mail, and wait for e-mail responses to continue the workflow process. This code-intensive session gives users taking their first steps with workflow a good grounding in some of the key extensibility concepts.


Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 3 of 7): Hosting and Communications Options in Workflow Scenarios (Level 300)
The session looks at options for hosting workflow applications. We cover managing events, instance tracking, and persistence, and provide a close look at the simple communications mechanisms that are available for you to use in your workflow applications.


Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 4 of 7): Workflow, Messaging, and Services: Developing Distributed Applications with Workflows (Level 300)
Web service technologies have typically taken a "do-it-yourself" approach to maintaining the interoperation state of services. Using workflow, developers now have tools that allow them to describe the long-running state of their services and delegate much of the state management to the underlying platform. Managing this state correctly becomes even more challenging in applications that coordinate work across multiple services either within an organization or at an Internet scale. This session looks at how developers who use either Microsoft ASMX or Microsoft's framework for building service-oriented applications, code-named "Indigo", can create workflow-oriented applications that are both faster to write and more manageable and flexible once deployed.


Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 5 of 7): Developing Event Driven State Machine Workflows (Level 300)
State machines used to be something that you had to first draw on paper and then implement in code. This session shows how to use technologies to create event-driven workflows and how to apply this to a typical programming problem. We introduce the concept of a flexible process and show how this can help with modeling real-world processes using state and sequential workflow. Plenty of coding is included to illustrate how you can seamlessly merge state machine design and your code.


Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 6 of 7): Extending Workflow Capabilities with Custom Activities (Level 300)
It is helpful to think of activities as controls within a workflow, similar to controls used with Microsoft ASP.NET Pages or Microsoft Windows Forms. You can use activities to encapsulate execution logic, communicate with the host and decompose a workflow into reusable components. This session examines the simple process of creating custom activities. If you want to expose activities to other developers designing workflows, you are likely to find this session valuable.


Intro to Windows Workflow Foundation (Part 7 of 7): Developing Rules Driven Workflows (Level 300)
Rules can be a powerful business tool when combined with workflow. In this session, learn how to develop more advanced activities that support the modeling of rich business behavior such as human workflow. Understand when to use rules for business logic, and see how rule policies allow for the description of sophisticated behavior in an integrated and flexible way. This session gives you an interesting insight into the power of using workflow at the core of a line of business application.