Today I was at the session WCF 4.0 Building WCF Service with WF in .NET 4.0
Many new and very interesting features are being built into WCF & WF 4.0.
Nowadays in WF it’s kind of challenging to make a choice between synchronous and a-synchronous:
Synchronous = Simple to author and maintain performs poorly
Asynchronous = Performs well call can be made in parallel, difficult to author and maintain
WF / WCF 4.0 makes that live a bit easier. The configuration and development in WF 4.0 to call asynchronous services is quite a lot easier (Soon with examples!)
The designer for configuring endpoints and WCF activities looks a bit smoother. As far as I can see it ‘pre-scans’ the *.config file which endpoint to choose, or create your new endpoint.
Correlation is now also with content, so you can relate to values inside the message. You can still use the contexttoken (as in .NET 3.5) but now you have the option to do xpath queries and select based on which kind of content you would like to continue the instance. Only I question myself why xpath? Can’t I use objects since it’s a datacontract? (Maybe later more info on this.)
Also I saw a live demonstration on Dublin the new hosting platform for WF. Dublin is an extension on IIS. It’s some very cool features like:
- Routing connect the right message with the correct version
- monitor al running workflows (with tracking enabled), restart, stop
- Lookback workflows
- See event details on activities in the tracking tool
- More info will come soon.
Conclusion very cool times ahead for WF and WCF.