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Announcing the Release of Workflow Manager 1.0

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Today we announced the RTM release of Workflow Manager 1.0, a new offering that builds on and extends the capabilities of WF 4.5.  It's been an incredibly busy time for the team, and we're thrilled to get this release out to our customers, hot on the heels of our WF enhancements in .NET 4.5.  As previously mentioned, this first release of Workflow Manager has had a strong focus on supporting the upcoming releases of SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365.

Thank you to all of you who helped us validate and improve Workflow Manager 1.0.  We look forward to your continued feedback!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2012
    Is this a replacement for AppFabric on Windows Server? If not, could you provide guidance on scenarios where this would be a better choice than AppFabric?

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2012
    Ulrich, This release doesn’t replace AppFabric for Windows Server.  Workflow Manager and AppFabric support somewhat different scenarios and had different design goals, much like WorkflowApplication and WorkflowServiceHost in .NET support different scenarios, while leveraging the same WF core. WorkflowServiceHost (WFSH) is focused on building workflows that consume WCF SOAP services and expose workflows as WCF SOAP services.  The scenario focus was on standalone Enterprise apps/workflows that used service-based composition and integration.  AppFabric focuses on adding management capabilities to IIS-hosted WFSH workflows. Workflow Manager 1.0 had as its key scenarios: multi-tenant ISVs and cloud scale (we are running the same technology as an Azure service behind Office 365).  From a messaging standpoint, we focused on REST and Service Bus support since that aligned with both our SharePoint integration story, as well as the predominant messaging models in new cloud-based applications.   As mentioned, we also had to scope the capabilities in this release largely around the SharePoint scenarios.  We’ve already started planning the next set of capabilities/scenarios for Workflow Manager. If you’re using AppFabric and it’s meeting your needs, it makes sense to stick with that (and you should be sure to check out the new 4.5 investments we made in WFSH).  If you have specific scenarios that require the multi-tenant and scaleout characteristics of Workflow Manager, are Azure-focused, or do/will primarily use REST and/or Service Bus based messaging, then you may want to evaluate Workflow Manager. Hope that helps.

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2012
    Hi, Jurgen: WF manager sounds exciting, but, It seems that it does not allow me to push activity that is authored using code, inherited from nativeActivity,does this means all the activities and workflows has be build based on messaging activities and Xaml? I need to push WF in XAML and I need to run multi workflow instances at the any given time. the workflow manager fits very well in this picture, but, I do not know how to get my workflow pushed, again, my WF is a xaml based, the base activities of the workflow is from an custom activity library and all the activities are arthored using code. Please let me know how can I take advantegy of WF manager, or I need to wrap my activity behind webservice and auther workflow in XAML to invoke the webservice. thanks in advance for your help.

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2012
    Yuwen, Workflow Manager 1.0 has been optimized for XAML-based workflows and activities.  As you observed, in this model your activities are composed from our activity library, including our messaging activities.  Custom code can be placed in a custom web service invoked by our messaging activities.   If your preference is to instead use custom code to define your activities, you can find instructions here: msdn.microsoft.com/.../jj193517(v=azure.10).aspx

  • Anonymous
    December 26, 2012
    Its good to see WF 1.0 go RTM. I was looking for some resouces on specifically for WorkflowManager there’s integration with windows Azure Service Bus.

  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2013
    Ajay, When you install Workflow Manager, Service Bus for Window Server is automatically also installed on the same machine/VM.  We currently do not support using Workflow Manager against Windows Azure Service Bus. If I misunderstood your question, feel free to send me a mail at JWillis or post to our Workflow Manager forum: social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../threads