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Should I worry about learning Windows Workflow?

Ok, so I learned WPF and WCF, and that was great. I was not worried about CardSpace because it is probably not going to take off.

Should I worry about Workflow, is it worth it? What a big deal?

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It is worth exploring or at least understanding WF. WF offers another paradigm for building applications, a paradigm that could become mainstream in the future. Enterprisey? Yes, maybe today. But a longer-term WF, or at least the paradigm that it encourages, can become ubiquitous and universal. Using Workflow to describe programs may today be at a stage when OO and C ++ were 20 years ago.

Learning a new thing expands your thinking. For example, even if you use C # or Java in your daily work, knowing Lisp helps to broaden your thinking on how to solve problems. IMO WF is the same.

The second thought is to think like an investor. If you want to add value to YOU ​​as a programmer, whether you should study WF depends on the market or the job you are in. WF lessons in your space or in your company may or may not be worth the extra effort.
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The Windows workflow is useful for several different kinds of applications. If you do not write any of them, then there is no need to study it.

  • Human workflows are obvious
  • This can be useful for complex navigation through the navigation interface.
  • This can be very useful as a way to handle multiple operations in parallel. This is a very simple way to do asynchronous processing.
  • Multi-step long-term operations
  • Rule Based Processing
  • Any situation where you need to allow your customers to customize behavior. You can send custom actions related to your application, and then clients can combine and parameterize them.

But if you don’t need it, why bother? Just read some of the documents or look at some of the videos and see if it looks interesting.

An interesting thing that is not obvious: a workflow developer and rule designer can be hosted in arbitrary Windows Forms applications. This allows you to reuse them in your application if, for example, you need a way to configure conditional processing.

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I think the general consensus regarding the current Windows workflow is that the product is not yet ready for prime time. If you want to get something more than trivial, achieved with the current structure, you probably have to write a few custom tasks to fill in the gaps in functionality. I also had problems with the designer when the complexity of the workflow begins to build up.

From what I heard / read about Windows Workflow, the next version (v4.0) is a complete overhaul that fixes many problems in the current version. They require backward compatibility with v3 / 3.5 workflows, but you probably need to know the structure well to find out what has changed and how to fix it if it doesn't work right away.

If you don’t have a project that absolutely needs this feature today, you should probably wait until new bits are sent.

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As Paul said, it depends on the environment in which you work. Personally, since I never know where my life will go (corporate development, launch, etc.). I try to learn everything that I can when I have a chance.

My advice will be if you have the time, intuition and development environment ... find out about it. You never know when it might come in handy at some point along the way.

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Thanks to all the guys. Syso received an answer because he received the highest votes, but all opinions were appreciated. I think I will take Scroll Lock advice and wait until version 4.0 until I get a serious look.

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I really liked the workflow concept, but in the end I think I just use something like stateless or collapse my own statemachine and use the database to save. My biggest problem with this right now is that there is still a huge memory leak during workflow execution. Annoys me.

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It depends on the type of software you create. WPF is neat. WCF uses it. However, Windows Workflow is an "enterprise." This requires more customization and can become complicated.

If you did not create enterprise software that would benefit from a defined workflow, I would not bother him much.

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