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I questioned whether you would want to invest in BizTalk orchestrations if WWF is already around. Darren Jefford perfectly describes the fundamental differences between WWF and BizTalk. I think the two biggest arguments are that BizTalk acts as a reliable, scalable host to orchestrations and automatically persists the state while in WWF you need do both things yourself.
This proves that BizTalk has added value, even in the orchestration space. I still see situations in which the choice is tougher, but the majority of the orchestrations I build today, would probably be done in BTS anyway, even with WWF around. Which doesn't make WWF useless in any way. I can imagine applications that become very flexible because their abilities are exposed as WWF activities and tied together through WWF Workflows. That is very powerful stuff.
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I just saw a video on Channel 9 about the BizTalk Solution Designer. That stuff is really brilliant. The solution designer gives you a visual workspace that you can use to create ports, assign pipelines and maps to them and visually define the routing rules between them. Very intuitive and very well done.
Unfortunately, if I understood the video correctly, it will be in the version of BizTalk that ships after BTS2006. Which is a bummer because the stuff that was shown is really a missing link in creating complex message routing environments. Cool stuff, though.
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Mike Fitzmaurice has all the announcements on the next version of SharePoint on his blog. Interestingly enough he doesn't mention ECM (Enterprise Content Management), which I earlier today understood was somehow being tightly connected to SharePoint and WWF. Does that mean that ECM is a product in itself? Or was it missed in his list?
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I have been playing with Windows Workflow Foundation for the last hour, just following the lab. To early to judge it, just on a one hour experience, but to me, as a BizTalk developer, I see a lot of similarities between WWF and BizTalk orchestration. Which makes me wonder...
If BizTalk is beta1 and WWF is beta1, is Microsoft going to publish two technologies in roughly the same timeframe (estimated on release numbering, but I haven't seen an announcement on WWF's availability yet), delivering roughly the same functionality, but completely uninterchangeable? I don't understand. I see a lot of additional value in BTS2006 over WWF, so I can account for the licensing costs. But I wouldn't want to invest in building BTS orchestrations when the technology that going to replace it is already available, or would I?
NOTE: These are thoughts from the head, based on assumptions and incomplete information. I'm just wondering and hoping some of you do have more information on this.
UPDATE: Ilske pointed me to some information in the WWF article from David Chappell. It features a decision list on when to choose which technology. Although I think this list is very sensible, I still think that investing in XLANG orchestrations is a tough decision when you not only know the technology is going to be replaced but also have the replacing technology available. Or am I missing a point here?
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I had a little issue with running through the DLINQ sample on SQL Server 2005. The sample uses auto-attaching of databases, which didn't work on my box.
Solve this by attaching the database from "C:\Program Files\LINQ Preview\Data\northwnd.mdf" using the SQL Server Management Console and replace this line
DataContext db = new DataContext(
@"C:\Program Files\LINQ Preview\Data\northwnd.mdf");
with this line
DataContext db = new DataContext(
@"Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=True");
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I have invested quite some time lately to get one environment in VirtualPC where I have all the betas running. That is: VS2005, VSTS, SQL2005, Team Foundation, VSTO, WinFX and BTS2006. GAT and DSL is still on the list ;-). So I can play with any one of them when I like to. Tonight I added Atlas, Workflow Services and LINQ to that same box without a problem. I'm amazed.
I find it unbelievably fantastic that Microsoft got LINQ running on a beta of .NET in a beta of Visual Studio integrated as it is. Sure, there are issues, but it works. You can actually play with it. Hats off for Microsoft for committing to developers so early in the development cycle and make it so easy to play with it.
I remember the days not to long ago where you had to read all the guides, looking for lines like 'the beta version of this product does not work with the beta version of that product'. Sure, the CTP builds breaks this, but if you stick to .NET beta 2 it all works.
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Yesterday I was a little disappointed when the PDC news didn't include workflow capabilities and design tools for WPF. Apparantly another keynote was scheduled for today and today beta1 of Windows Workflow Foundation and the Microsoft Expression Suite were announced. You can read about the WWF and the Expression Suite on Microsoft PressPass. Links to more information are available from there. I particularly like the note that WWF is already integrated into Office 12 and SharePoint. Apparently a preview was given on SharePoint which included "significant enhancements to Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies including integrated workflow capabilities built upon Windows Workflow Foundation directly inside familiar Office system applications, bringing together document management, records management and Web content management for unified, integrated, scalable enterprise content management (ECM)". BizTalk vNext will also build upon WWF.
This PDC has already raised my bar of expectation a lot. I can only hope Microsoft can live up to it. Let's see if I can play around with some of the bits right now.
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Okay, my manager didn't allow me to go to the PDC, but the fun (the keynote by Bill Gates and Jim Allchin) was live on the internet and I watched it front to back. Of course a whole lot is blogged about it, but here are my highlights.
I must say I was both disappointed and pleasantly suprised.
Disappointmoints first:
I had expected news around how you build and design an Avalon application (sorry, I mean WPF-based application ;-). Clemens Vasters is very right when he notes that the current developer experience is not exactly 'super easy'. I'd rather say it is very non-intuitive and a big burden to get started playing around with it if you only have a few evening hours to spare. That needs to be improved quickly.
One thing I saw in a WPF-demo particularly interested me. A demo was given about how you can completely do the redesign of your application, without changing any code. That goal was reached by completely relying on the databinding facilities of WPF. That is a major thing. Every time I try to build a Forms-application that has a richer interface than the standard grid control, I always get to a point where I need to write code to generate a control hierarchy. That code is very hard to maintain. I think WPF makes this extremely easy.
The second little disappointment was in the Office 12 space. I had hoped to see a demo of the great possibilities the new file formats give you. I can imagine a word document that goes through a certain workflow scenario in which it gets enriched automatically with content and metadata. The only thing that was shown in this space was the fact that SharePoint vNext does store PowerPoint presentations as individual slides. Which makes it incredibly ease to create a new presentation by mixing and matching existing slides. That is cool. However, nothing was mentioned about the enabling technology and whether you can use the same trick elsewhere. I can imagine you build a contract word document by mixing and matching paragraphs the same way.
There was a lot on RSS. I hoped to hear a vision on personalized RSS feeds. I would love to have a RSS feed on my email inbox, but I want that to be secure. I think the identity work in the InfoCards space will enable that and hoped that this step was announced. But I can understand InfoCards need to be a step further to enable those scenarios.
The last disappointment was how IE7 tabs were shown as a unique innovation. They can't be serious! He really said, look if I control-click a new tab is opened. DUH. The interesting innovation was the screen where you could see thumbnails of all opened webpages and you could close the ones you no longer needed from there. And IE finally is able to print a webpage on paper correctly. Finally.
The hot news for me:
I was suprised by the amount of Vista exposure during the keynote. I hadn't expected that since I thought most of it was known already. What I found cool in this space?
- The sidebar in which you can plug gadgets that inform you on 'real-time' data. What was particularly interesting is that they showed the SideShow, a mini-screen on a laptop (but I guess it could also be on something else that is connected) that gives you easy access to your gadgets. The cool thing is that most gadgets don't need the laptop to be turned to be active. Very handy.
- IE7 RSS Support. I know, it was out in the open for a while, but to me it was the first time I saw it work. Looked very handy to me.
- BillG and JimA gave a little inside view on the roadmap where I thought two vision statement where particurarly interesting
- The next big step for WinFS after the upcoming version is integrating the desktop and server file system. I think this is key to get real information integration in an organization.
- Server computing should work towards the same integrated experience that we already know on the desktop. Workflow, Content Management and Search (among others) should be able integrate much more easily than it does today. Connected Systems are about how to Analyse, Access, Share, Find, Automate and Publish Information
- Searching and thumbnails of opened applications are available everywhere in Vista. If you Alt-Tab you see thumbnails of the selected program, same counts when hovering over program icons on the taskbar. Very handy.
- Vista can auto-optimize you workspace. One very interesting innovation was Superfetch. Superfetch starts preloading often-used DLL's based on your usage patterns. This means the DLL's are in memory which greatly improves startup time of those application.
- Document metadata is part of the Explorer experience. You can set metadata by dragging documents in the explorer. Documents can also be grouped by metadata, even across folders. Very nice.
The Office 12 demo was very interesting:
- The new UI is very cool. A lot on that is written elsewhere, I won't redo that here.
- PowerPoint allows for rich bullet templates. Like, putting all you bullets on a arrow or in a circle. Nice.
- SharePoint vNext has a recycle bin. Finally.
- A new todo bar in Outlook that shows unread mail, tasks among other info
- Interesting innovation but the next one is very cool. SharePoint and Outlook will both support RSS out-of-the-box. SharePoint publishes RSS, Outlook has a reader. What you can do is subscribe to a documents library RSS feed from Outlook and that way take the documents offline on the road. I think that the RSS-enablement of both tools opens up a whole lot of possibilities on information integration.
- Microsoft CRM will be RSS-enabled to allow information subscription
- Outlook allows for attachment previewing within the preview pane. What is nice is that this also works for Infopath documents. Which allows for forms that are directly shown inside Outlook, which makes it very easy for users to respond to those forms.
LINQ/WCF/Atlas/WPF/InfoCards/RSS demo
- This was the coolest demo I have seen in a long time. Four key architects wrote an application on stage that queried the processes on the machine, enhanced with database data, all strong-typed with LINQ (Language Integrated Query). LINQ was also used to write out RSS (via it's XML capabilities). This RSS was made available via a couple of WCF endpoints (added when necessary). Firstly, this endpoint was consumed via Atlas over JASON (didn't know that protocol). Same thing with WPF, in which the communication was secured via InfoCards. The strong point in the whole demo was how quickly they integrated all these technologies together. Sure, it was pre-thought of, but still, most of the key code was written on stage and it worked like a charm. It really gave me the feeling that application development is taken to the next level with these technologies.