Foundations of WF: An Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation View Larger Image | Brian Myers
Apress, Paperback, Published October 2006, 264 pages, ISBN 1590597184 | List Price: $34.99
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Customer Reviews: 3 Average Customer Rating:    Write a Review and tell the world about this title! People who purchase this book frequently purchase: Books on similar topics, in best-seller order:Books from the same publisher, in best-seller order:
Foundations of WF: An Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation introduces
you to using Visual Studio 2005 and the Windows Workflow Foundation (part of
Windows Vista) to create workflow packages. The book begins by giving you an
overview of Windows Workflow Foundation. Then it introduces and shows examples
of the various types of workflow that can be created.
This book is thorough. Code examples are shown in both VB .NET and C#. And
the book even features a chapter on linking WF with the upcoming release of
Office 12. Finally, the book shows you how to incorporate workflow packages
into ASP.NET and Windows applications.
About the Author
Brian Myers is a Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft Certified Application
Developer for .NET. He is currently a software engineer and database administrator.
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 3 Average Customer Rating: Dec 19, 2006 Jason Grundy
Successful but superficial introduction
Brian's book successfully delivers what it promises - an introduction to WF. It definitely does not target the experienced user (there is Pro book for them) who should stick to the Internet and the official Microsoft documentation but that is not the target audience. For those people who like a little more hand-holding when embracing a new technology this book can be recommended.
Dec 6, 2006 Ryan Sturgeon from Kokomo, In User Group
A nice introductory title on Windows Workflow
An Introduction to Windows WorkFlow Foundation
This is a nice introductory title on beginning Workflow foundation on Windows.Windows workflow foundation is getting very popular recently with new operating system coming up its way and a very new version of MS-office. Each and every chapter has very detailed explanation and real world examples attached to it.The presentation style of Brian Myers is very simple and straight.The concepts inside the book are very clear and rich in details.
Chapter 1: Introduction to workflow and windows workflow foundation and chapter 2: first workflow has great introduction to windows workflow history and how to achieve this task using Visual Studio 2005.The architecture explained in the book was very depth in detail. Author also has mentioned various languages vb.net and c# to program windows workflow which is very impressive.
chapter 3 conditional activities, chapter 4 flow activities and chapter 5 Rule based workflow clearly explains how a programmer can control the run time behavior of work flow activities using vb.net and c# languages.Flow activities chapter greatly covers the states of current workflow activity. It also explains to control the state related activities using vb.net and c# languages in great detail with nice examples.
Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, workflow and webservices, and interacting with workflow explains how to establish a communication channel between webservices and windows workflow. Programmers with webservices or webapplication experience would benefit a lot from these two chapters.
Nov 27, 2006 Noah Subrin from Atlanta, GA
Good WF Intro Book!
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is one of the four technological "pillars" of the .Net Framework 3.0 release. It is deeply integrated in a host of Microsoft products such as Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server 2005, and the Vista operating system. As you can imagine, the topic is very broad and deep. I have begun speaking to local user groups in the Atlanta area about WF, and it is difficult to cover the depth and breadth of this topic in a one hour overview.
Based on feedback from my presentations, there definitely is a need for an introductory WF book which discusses several of the key concepts, that might not be covered sufficiently in a one hour lecture. In my opinion, Foundations of WF by Brian R. Myers (Apress, 2007) fills this niche.
The target audience is the developer who is just getting started with WF. Because the product was just recently released - this includes just about everyone! The book is written with a focus on the VB .Net programmer which is unusual because most of the SDK (software development kit) samples that are available are primarily written in C#. I would, however, recommend the book to both VB .Net and C# programmers, because many of the source code samples available for download are also available in C#. The complete source code, however, is only available in VB .Net. The book is clearly written, and the author explains what the focus for each chapters is, and why the concept is important.
Some of the chapters of the book that I thought were very helpful were those dealing with rules (Chapter 5), conditional activites (Chapter 3), flow activities (Chapter 4), and one that discussed persistence (Chapter 9). There also were examples of 'real world' examples such as a purchase order system, and an employee review system, that reinforced the concepts that were introduced in each chapter. The author also does a good job of pointing out the differences between writing a workflow in Visual Studio .Net using VB .Net versus C# (Chapter 2), which are mostly syntactical in nature.
I felt that the chapter dealing with WF and web services (Chapter 6) was too brief and could have included additional detail. In addition, in several chapters, some of the data validation code in the "real world examples" was not robust enough to be considered "ready for prime time". Noticeably absent, was the use of TryParse or a similar algorithm to check for correct data types. Some of the source code available for download also contained errors so I was not able to test all of the code examples end to end. There also were several typos,and the book still refers to the WF SDK, WinFX, and SharePoint Portal Server. These names are now referred to as the Windows SDK, .Net Framework 3.0, and MOSS Server respectively.
Overall, I think the book is a very good introduction to WF and I would recommend the book to the software developer who is looking for more than the "50,000" foot view of WF. It contains code samples in every chapter, which do a good job of reinforcing the concepts contained in each chapter. It also clarifies a lot of crucial material that doesn't really get explained sufficiently when doing the hands-on-labs available for download from Microsoft
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