*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Codemash 2008 scheduled for January 9th-11th is only a few months away.  It seems like only a few months ago I was watching Jim Holmes walk around the Kalahari Resort in a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops with six inches of snow on the ground outside.  Good times.  Another Codemash event is just around the corner and rumor has it the sessions have been finalized. 

I have two sessions slated for Codemash, both of which will be given on Workflow Foundation.  The first session is an introduction to Workflow Foundation.  Here is the abstract:

Your boss comes up to you and gives you some business logic one day at work. You spend weeks coding it. As soon as you get done he informs you the rules have changed. You want to smack him/her in the face but you politely smile and say thank you, I’ll have that done in a few weeks. Little does your boss know you’ve used Workflow Foundation to map out all the business logic. You quickly make the change declaratively within Workflow and go back to reading your RSS feeds. While this scenario isn’t true, it can be if you use Workflow Foundation. In this talk we’ll explore what Workflow Foundation is from the ground up so you’ll have a good sense of where to get started when you head back to the office.

In this session I hope to give a really good no non-sense introduction to Workflow Foundation.  What I mean by that is I’m not going to spend 30 minutes talking about Workflow Foundation and then show a demo.  I think for developers to really get WF they have to see it, touch it, caress it, squeeze it and call it George.  I can tell you all day long about Activities and Extensibility but until one sees just how cool it is you aren’t going to really get it.  Bottom line is plan on getting your feet wet with Workflow Foundation as soon as possible and then I’ll explain what the heck is going on under-the-hood. 

The second session I’m going to speak on is “Building Custom Workflow Activities”.  Here is the abstract for this session:

Workflow Foundation is a powerful tool that allows you to declaratively design and map out application logic. While a lot of custom logic can be created using the Code activity provided out of the box, it doesn’t work very well when you move workflow out of Visual Studio and into the hands of business analyst or end users who want to re-configure workflows. The real power of WF shines through when you build custom activities that can be re-used on numerous workflows by end users and other developers. In this session we will look at Workflow Foundation from the ground floor all the way through building custom workflow activities from scratch. In the end we’ll design a reusable workflow activity that can be easily configured complete with validation.

This session is all about code.  I think there are only 4 slides in the whole deck that basically explain why you want to write custom code activities in Workflow Foundation.  From then on it is all about code.  It is called “Code”-mash no?