Windows Workflow isn't workflow

Ask anybody who's had any experience of workflow software what it is and they'd likely give you a different answer to the next person you ask. But I'm fairly certain if they took a look at Windows Workflow they'd probably say it's not what they understand workflow to be about.

I'm the same and it's one reason why when I first looked at WF I was a little disappointed. But as time goes on and I play with it more and more I'm realising what a really nice piece of technology it is. In fact I'd say I'm actually very pleased that Microsoft didn't build another workflow system because it very likely wouldn't have met my needs either. There are hundreds of workflow systems out there, all implemented differently from each other and all meeting certain needs and failing to meet other needs.

I guess somebody at Microsoft realised this and rather than producing yet another workflow system (YAWFS for short), they wrote a framework for developing any kind of long-running process you'd like to build on top of it. As far as I'm aware nobody else has tried to come up with anything similar and the outcome is far more impressive than YAWFS. The book 'Essential Windows Workflow' explains it a whole lot better than I can but essentially it's a whole new way of writing software. No longer do you need to worry about what to do when you need to wait for a day before moving onto the next step in your code and it seems like threading issues will be much reduced. I'm almost inclined to think that WF may be the answer to a lot of the multi-threading pain we suffer today and really need to solve PDQ in a world of multi-core processors, although I need to delve deeper to know for sure. If you come from a .NET background, you can reuse those skills in WF, although it has to be said the learning curve can be quite steep. 

And it seems like they've succeeded in their aims. Not only are people using WF for workflow products, they are using it for things that you wouldn't necessarily associate with workflow. In conclusion, I think it rocks.