My Windows Workflow Foundation contribution

    My blog has been silent for awhile due to me being moved from BizTalk Accelerators to the new workflow technology dubbed Windows Workflow Foundation. Since it was officially announced today, I can start back up and fill the backlog of info I need to get out of my head and into digital form.

    Since I'm a Programmer Writer here at Microsoft, you will find my Windows Workflow Foundation contribution in the documentation. My responsibilities include getting the content for the Windows Workflow Foundation samples in the doc set (the actual samples are created by several product team members however), adding content to the main Programmer's Guide and putting together a set of Tutorials in the docs. Since I wrote the tutorials I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of the code. Not being one to go down the "Hello World" route, I tried to add a little flavor to the tutorials by creating some close to real world scenarios while still making it easy to follow. As an example, the Creating a Custom Activity tutorial demonstrates the WebTear activity whose sole purpose is to rip the text from a web page and get that data into the workflow.

    A little later today, I will post the full project source code of the 3 tutorials that are included in the documentation. Although I prefer you to run through the tutorials and copy-paste the code in yourself, I know that some people just want to download the complete source and just pick it apart by reading it. Stay tuned later (as soon as I pump more caffeine through my veins).