What are your experiences with Windows Workflow Foundation?

Question

I am evaluating WF for use in line of business applications on the web, and I would love to hear some recent first-hand accounts of this technology.

My main interest

Answer 1

It really depends on what you want to do with it. I've only used it a little, but compared to more mature products like MetaStorm (I know technically it's a BPM, but there is still a workflow component), Process Choriographer and IBM MQ workflow, there's no comparison. It's just not mature enough. On the other hand it's free where the others are not and can probably get the job done. I don't know if I would place a multi-million dollar operation on it, but with smaller ones, I'd give it another shot. The real hurdle you are going to face is the change in thought process it requires. If you don't have developers that have worked with state systems before that can be a real hurdle.

Answer 2

We had a project at work that I was involved in using Workflows. The idea (from management), was that us programmers would write the Workflow Activities along with the "engine" and framework. Then non-programmers would take care of all the rest by compiling their own Workflows into dlls which the engine would automatically load.

Management was sold on this idea of non-programmers using Workflow to help develop software, and it was pretty much a complete waste of time. The problem we were trying to solve with this project was relatively complex and we knew from the very beginning that the software would have to be modified almost constantly (its calculations were dependent on other companies and governements).

The end result was that we were unable to make the Workflow modules generic enough for anyone else to use. So the programmers were the ones who were forced to work with the Workflows, and all the Workflows did was get in our way.

Answer 3

Never tried WFF, but I remember reading this article about WFF by Leon Bambrick where he basically says the whole genre of software development tools is nonsense. Might help you decide one way or the other.

Answer 4

WF ist integrated into SharePoint (WSS 3.0), and i have created quite a few workflows for various SharePoint-Websites, so i can tell about my experience of WF in SharePoint. Compared with other workflow-frameworks WF scores well. It's stable (i haven't experienced any mysterious errors), workflows are fairly easy to design (thank to the workflow-designer in Visual Studio) and you can use not only sequential but also state-machine workflows.

It's not perfect, of course, and a developer will definitly need some time to understand the concept (of i.e. the Activity Model); but it's definitely useable - even for "small tasks".

Answer 5

I've been using Workflow 4.0 for the last few months and although mostly impressed, I've found it extremely hard to learn.

For the most recent version (that comes with .NET 4.0 RC), there is next-to-no documentation on the web, in any books or no training courses available. I've only found articles relating to the now defunct 3.0 version. Even the MSDN documenation is light on the ground.

The workflow designer is not as intuitive as it should be by any means so learning is very hard. I've had to rely on answers from a single person on StackOverflow (thanks by the way Maurice!) - and I would be stuffed without his help.

So in summary, I think it has potential but you would be quite mad to learn it yet - wait for more training, documentation and books otherwise you will be going into it blind!

Answer 6

Last year we completed a working application with WF, now used as the backbone of an unbelievably huge system which is used by a very big bank for its mortgage process. The pe process has many steps starting from customer application to approval of credit.

Although it was a success, there were so many problems and crisis all along the way. And it wont worth the trouble for any smaller size projects.