On march 26, 2007 it was announced that TeamPlain is now freely downloadable for Team Foundation Server customers as a result of Microsoft's acquisition of devBiz, creators of this excellent product. This is great news, as customers who paid a lot of money for TFS had to lay down some extra money (per user) for TeamPlain licenses.
TeamPlain enables webbased access to Team Foundation Server features; work-items, documents and reports. Remember that every user still needs a Client Access License (CAL). But if you're already using TFS, be sure to download the now free TeamPlain.
Recently Anko Duizer started a discussion inside Class-A about Windows Workflow Foundation, specifically about state machine workflow vs. sequential workflow. One point of discussion was why in (almost) every presentation out there, the sequential workflow is being demonstrated.
Sequential workflows are pretty easy to understand and probably most used in design documents. However, I've implemented Workflow Foundation on several projects and have always used a state machine workflow, simply because it was the best possible solution to the problem at hand. And although I never actually thought about it, the discussion internally made me wonder myself if sequential workflow has any use. I've used them inside the different states of my state machine, but never have I used a sequential workflow on its own.
Is this because they don't represent anything but simple if statements in your code? And everything that spans over time is implemented using a state machine? Are state machines so hard to explain to people, or do the presenters just don't get them? Anko also proves in his article that the workflow of the expense demo, published on MSDN, is much easier to draw, implement and query the state with a state machine workflow.
I'm curious if people have implemented sequential workflows in their applications and could explain the why and how? Leave a comment here or on Anko's weblog.
What a week! Both the new Visual Studio "Orcas" and Enterprise Library 3.0 CTPs are released.
Enterprise Library got some fixes and the new Policy Injection Application Block is now included. I'm very much interested in it as it'll give a lot of new possibilities in future software products. I'm currently setting up a design/framework for a client to work with and I think I'll have to ditch EntLib 2.0 for 3.0.
Go read the info at Tom Hollander's blog or download it here.
About the new "Orcas" CTP you're best of with a lot of download links at Guy Burstein's blog, or a quick link to the download here.