Hosting a Workflow in a Local Executable using Workflow Services Part II

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When the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)*was first introduced in the .NET Framework 3.0, the only way to host a workflow in a client application was to use the WorkflowRuntime class programmatically, start the runtime, and create/start an instance of a workflow.* Furthermore, if you wanted to communicate between the client code and the workflow logic, you needed to ues a ExternalDataExchangeService.* This required a fair amount coding effort to get even the simplest of workflows up and running.* The .NET Framework 3.5 introduced Workflow Services which are Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services authored as workflows.* Workflow Services give you a new way to accomplish this scenario using a much simpler,*cleaner, and arguably more elegant approach.* In this three part screencast, I show you how to improve on the more*manual hosting + ExternalDataExchangeServices approach by hosting a workflow in a client executable*using Workflow Service.

Part I - Reviewing the SimpleExpenseReport application from the Create a Sequential Workflow tutorial so we can compare the two approaches. The application explicitly hosts the WorkflowRuntime & uses ExternalDataExchangeService

Part II - Walking through the fundamentals of creating a Workflow Service and hosting the Workflow Service locally

Part III - Walking through my rewrite of the SimpleExpenseReport application using Workflow Services.

Source code for the Workflow Services version of SimpleExpenseReport is available*at http://cid-1f72da7294089597.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/WCF_WF/SimpleExpenseReportWorkflowServices.zip.

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Watch the screencast(WMV)

 

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