Paul
Andrew announced recently a coming CTP [1] that will provide
BPEL 1.1 support to Windows Workflow Foundation. This will provide a set of custom
WF activities that map to BPEL 1.1 constructs as well as tooling to import BPEL processes
into WF XAML workflows and export the other way around.
I think overall this is very good news and, as Paul says, highlights the power and
flexibility offered by the domain-neutrality of the WF runtime. Paul also mentions
that this will, in the end, be supported in a future release of BizTalk Server, once
the orchestration engine is built on top of WF, and by that time the toolkit support
should have already been expanded to provide BPEL 2.0 compatibility in both WF and
BizTalk. Pretty exciting stuff which I’m sure will provide some good selling points
for both products (even if many people don’t use it eventually).
One important aspect of this that is interesting to consider: the WF approach to writing
workflows means that, if BPEL compatibility is an aspect you care about, you’ll
need to restrict yourself to a subset of the power of WF in order to remain compatible (and
meaning being able to later export your WF workflows into BPEL). This is something
I completely expected and understand (and even welcome, to a point), but it’s something
some people might not realize right away.
[1] Am I the only one getting lost along the miriads of CTPs coming out of Redmond
lately? Seems pretty imposible to keep up if you actually have a day job!