Did you successfully adopt Windows Workflow in a real world web application?

Question

I have recently posted a question regarding the Windows Workflow running in a web application. Granted it was a fairly technical question that contained terms like ManualWorkflo

Answer 1

We use the state machine workflow to manage a couple service request processes with about 10 states each. I am not sure if it is was 100% the right choice, because implementing a simple state machine design would have been simpler(maybe we suffered here from BDUF).

The biggest downside for us was the learning curve. I mean, workflow is practically a stripped down version of biztalk(for free!).

Off the top of my head, these are the areas we've benefited from WF:

• Hosting the workflow as service forced us to decouple the workflow from our other layers, and this(so far) has been a pretty decent design.
• We have been able to easily interact with the work flow from various applications using the provided workflow service host
• Tracking service provides good business metrics
• Runtime service and persistance service are stable
• Changes to running workflows are complicated but work better than if we would have tried do it ourselves

I always try to keep in mind that it really is a foundation. As a developer/architect, you have to commit to building something useful on top of it.