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  • Pageflow Sample Update

    Updated to version 1.1 Changes Corrected the install to display the EULA at a more opportune time (thanks to this comment ) Updated to fix the exception being thrown at the completion of a workflow NavigationManager.cs AspUserInput.cs WebHostingModule.cs To install this, download the bits (same location), uninstall the existing version and install this version. Other Setup Notes I got a few pieces of feedback on the setup to get things working, here are some hints to get up and running: If you extract the samples.zip file in the install directory (Program Files\Windows Workflow Foundation Samples\...) they may be marked as read-only. Mark the whole directory as non-read-only (so you can write) and then you will be able to compile successfully. To run the sample, you need to set up a persistence database , this will be used to store the state of the workflow while we are not interacting with it Then go into the App.config or web.config and find the ConnectionString settings and update it to point to the correct database. On most default VS installs, you can point at localhost\sqlexpress, but it can certainly be any sql install. Other Notes For the folks using WCSF , Glenn has a good summary that fills in some of the story on the WCSF side, and sneaks an Eminem reference into the title :-) Read More...
  • Pageflow questions: "What about WCSF / Acropolis / Codename 'foo'"?

    So, I got a little bit of feedback from my initial post . First, thanks, it's great to see all of the interest in the technology. I want to use this as the place to answer common questions that arise about the sample. Here's one that I got internally as well as externally( here , here ) What about WCSF and Acropolis? Does this change how we think about the problem today? The short answers are "they are still here", "no". WCSF There are a lot of people who are using the Web Client Software Factory . It is definitely something you should check out, it is a great toolkit to build composite web applications. Part of what it does, among many other things, is the Pageflow Application Block designed to model navigation. This is what most people are wondering about when they first hear about the pageflow sample we released. Don't they do the same thing? From a functional level, yes, they both provide a nice abstraction to model flow through an application. This is a sample usage of WF to solve a similar problem in a little bit of a different way. The model inside the WCSF is extensible, allowing a different provider of pageflow information, so it is probably even possible to put this pageflow sample inside of the WCSF, I have yet to give that a try. At a deeper level, there are some differences that stem from the implementation of the Pageflow Application Block as a state machine, which I will get into in my next post. Acropolis Acropolis , announced at TechEd last week, is still early Read More...
  • Pageflow Questions: Why not a state machine?

    Here's a comment from my initial post introducing the pageflow sample from wleong: NavigatorWorkflow looks like a state machine to me. Why create a new workflow type? Tuesday, June 12, 2007 3:44 AM by wleong This is a good question. There a couple of reasons why we create our own workflow type: To more accurately model a process Enable different execution semantics Make development faster by focusing on the model, not the implementation details. For a little more background on the problem, see my previous post on " Different Execution Patterns for WF (or, Going beyond Sequential and State Machine) " that talks in a little more depth about the trouble one can encounter by only think about the two out of the box models. For this problem, in particular, all of the reasons are relevant. Accurately modeling a process It is very natural to think of UI navigation as a series of places we can be, and a set of transitions from any one of those places to another. That's what the navigator workflow models. There is a subtle difference from a state machine that plays to point 3 here. This model allows me to not worry about putting an IEventActivity at the top of a state, then making some decision and then setting a new state. We abstract away from defining the events, that's taken care of for us. This lets us model the process naturally. In a state machine, one could argue that modeling pageflow with transitions has me place one event and then have an IfElse activity that lets me decide which Read More...

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