To Workflow or Not to Workflow?

Question

I am responsible for a team of developers who will are about to start development of a light weight insurance claims system. The system involves a lot of manual tasks and bu

Answer 1

We have been using WF 4.0 the last couple of months. I have to say it's challenging to think the Workflow way. However, I can tell you it's worth it. We knew very little when we started. We've bought a beginner and professional book for WF 4.0 that helped. I, myself, watched many videos online and followed PDC 2009 for their breaking news about WF 4.0 and how it's different from the previous somewhat sucky versions. One major thing that we had to propose a solution for is the way we can deal with In/Our Arguments in a workflow without bounding our custom activities to certain data types and how to pass parameters between activities. I have come up with a good solution for that, and the workflow experience that we have so far is not bad at all. Actually, we have a workflow-intensive application that is getting bigger and bigger and I really cannot imagine myself solving it in a different environment. I love the visual effect that it has: it keeps me away from the details of if/else etc constructs and makes the business rules apparent in a way that doesn't make you forced to dive into lines of code to know what's going on or how to fix some bug. By the way, the project that we worked on is very similar to what you described and it's a medium-sized project. You can tell from my words that I like it and I do recommend it although is incorporates some risks as it's a new technology and you have to come up with some innovative ideas.

my 2 cents...