The ten Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) hands-on labs were updated today on Microsoft download center for your coding enjoyment!

These ten labs were initially posted when WF was new to the world and .NET 3.0 was hot off the presses. This past winter, the product management team worked with David Starr to get the labs converted to .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, make the manuals consistent, and bring the VB.NET code up par to follow the same best practices as the C# code.

Once installed, you will have the following labs installed on your machine:

  • WF01: Getting Started with WF
  • WF02: Creating Custom Activities with WF
  • WF03: Hosting Workflows in WF
  • WF04: Creating State Machine Workflows in WF
  • WF05: Communicating with the Host Application for WF
  • WF06: WF and Web Services
  • WF07: Creating Rules Driven Workflow in WF
  • WF08: Transactional Behavior in WF
  • WF09: Modifying Workflow Models at Runtime with Workflow Change in WF
  • WF10: Embedding the Workflow Designer for WF

About half the labs saw some significant updating and clean-up – and they should yield a greatly improved experience for the learner; we applied feedback from HOL participants who took the labs at our events and provided an evaluation. The second half of the labs were more simply migrated and cleaned up for consistency.

But wait! There’s more! 🙂

While we were at it, we added an eleventh lab to the mix. Because the labs were developed before the new WCF activities were introduced, we dug into the excellent Visual Studio 2008 training kit done by the DPE folks, we updated and cleaned up the lab that walked a user through using the new WCF Send and Receive activities for WF in .NET 3.5:

  • WF11: Workflow Enabled Services and Other New Features in the .NET Framework 3.5

The product management team will be making three additional hands-on labs available in the near future: unit testing WF workflows (currently available on MSDN Virtual Labs), unit testing WCF services, and advanced context management in WF 3.5 (built by Matt Milner, and unveiled at TechEd 2009 North America). All three labs have scored pretty well at events, and we’re looking forward to sharing them with you for direct download.

We hope that you find these updated labs useful; and, as always, welcome your feedback and comments.

Enjoy!
– Cliff