All of the information coming from Microsoft on Windows Workflow Foundation has made me think more and more about the role of SOA aggregation technologies. The concept of service orientation is a powerful one but the question that keeps coming to the surface is ... "HOw do I build services that are usable by more than one consumer?". This question always comes back to service identification and the long term value of a service that is being built. This is not a trivial decision and if you are working in a distributed heterogeneous enviornment the business logic tends to be extremely fragmented.

So the question remains how do I decide what is a reusable enterprise service? Well how about someting that is obviously an aggregegate in a current or future business workflow. This concept of workflow has unfortunately been reserved until now for complex cross application integration and orchestration with long running transactions. The introduction of Windows Workflow Foundation seems to be giving us a hall pass to think about workflow throughout our enterprise architecture.

So as we move into this new and exciting era of workflow disseciton, design, and delivery I wonder if the technology does not only give us an outstanding new set of bits to use when building these types of systems but also gives us a new clean slate of understanding of what workflows can be. With that new clean slate we can start to think about what goes into creating workflows and that is explicit, autnonomous service oriented building blocks.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can start to indentify, design and deliver services that will start to see the return on investment SOA has been promising since its inception. As many of us have seen this is not something that happens over night. What excites me about Windows Workflow Foundation is that it's one more of those low hanging fruit mechanisms for identifying reusable services. Way to go Microsoft! What a great way to reinforce what still can become the biggest shift in application architecture design this decade!

Yesterday I ran across what I thought was the coolest possible unveiling at PDC 05 (some detailed info on LINQ). Then I got home from work today and saw some interesting blog posts on WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation). What is that you ask, well it is not the resurgence of overpaid loud juicers throwing each other around on a canvas ring.

Ok then what could it be? Well if you watch the overview by Scott Woodgate and company (Windows Workflow Foundation) it looks like yet another major advancement in the toolset for buiding solutions that fit into an enterprise service-oriented architecture. Let me clarify, this technology in fact would be the tool to aggregate those loosley coupled components that are often considered enterprise "services". So the better definition would be the glue that finally allows us to piece meal together meaningful solutions from existing application building block services.

Of course most of my excitement is based on a demonstration from three guys in a room that is a couple thousand miles away. I am anxiously awaiting some CTP bits and some documentation to explain what has been delivered here. I still have many more questions than answers.

• Where does this position itself when it comes to Biztalk 2006? I just started to appreciate the value of WCF adapters with Biztalk but now I'm trying to understand how much WWF will help to enable typical workflow development.
• This is presented as a set of developers tools but I'm not sure this is really development work anymore. This almost is positioned as a model driven approach. Is this toolset usable by non-developers even?
• The WWF team talks about this being proprietary to the windows OS but it can consume WCF endpoints. Are there any plans to consider adapters that will enable interoperability with other platforms?
• Is this actually anything more than just portions of Biztalk baked into the .Net framework?
• What type of role does this play in an enterprise SOA?

I'm sure I'll think of some more, these were just my initial reactions after seeing the demonstration on Channel 9. If you get a chance watch it, it is really something to see. I'm still trying to figure out where this freaking came from.

More Info: Windows Workflow Foundation