TechEd 2008: A first look at “Oslo”, “Dublin” and WF 4.0
This session, done by David Chapell (very good and humorous speaker), does not have any demos. But, David explains very well what Oslo, Dublin and WF is all about.
The three technologies can be used together or separate of each other. WF is all about workflows (sequential or state machines). Dublin is an extension on Windows Application Server to host WF and WCF services. Oslo is the new modeling platform.
With WF developers are able to create long-running applications. To enable this long-running feature, WF persist the state of the running Workflow. WF makes it also much easier to do activities in parallel. WF 4.0 comes with a new designer, new activities (for accessing data and invoking Powershell cmdlets) and the Flowchart workflow. This is a workflow that is between a sequential workflow and the state machine workflow. David promises that WFF 4.0 has a much better performance.
Dublin provides the following features for hosting workflows and WCF Services. It provides:
- A scalable host
- Built-in persistence
- Management tools
- Auto start services
- Restart service instances
- Message forwarding (this helps with service versioning)
- Tracking
Dublin or BizTalk.
- Dublin is designed to host WF workflows and WCF services. Nothing more.
- BizTalk is about integration. Integration of LOB applications.
Oslo is about models. It provides a general purpose modeling platform. With Oslo you can model a “Business Process”, a WF workflow, data structures (data model), services etc. Oslo comes with a repository that stores schemas and instances of the schemas. The modeling language has the codename “M” and there is a modeling tool. “M” consists of “MSchema” and “MGrammer”. With MSchema you be able to define schemas and model relations between schemas. “MGammer” is a textual DSL (like SQL, regular expressions and MSchema) that can be parsed. MSchema is defined in MGrammer. Robert Jan van Holland did some things with MGrammer. Read his post here.
Oslo comes with Quadrant. In this tool you can create models like “business process” models and “WF workflow” models. I had made some photos of Quadrant, but I was not able to get them from my mobile phone ;-((.