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The Building Blocks of WF

As you build a workflow-enabled application, you will undoubtedly notice that it “feels different”

from building a typical .NET application. For example, up until this point in the text, every code

example began by creating a new project workspace (most often a Console Application project) and

involved authoring code to represent the program at large. A WF application also consists of custom

code; however, in addition, you are building directly into the assembly the business process itself.

Consider Figure 26-1, which illustrates the initial workflow diagram generated by Visual Studio 2008

when selecting a new Sequential Workflow Console Application project workspace.

Using this designer (and the various WF-centric tools integrated into Visual Studio) you are

able to model your process and eventually author code to execute it under the appropriate circum-

stances. You’ll examine these tools in more detail a bit later in this chapter.

Understand that WF is far more than a pretty designer that allows you to model the activities of

a business process. As you are building your WF diagram, the designer tools are authoring code to

represent the skeleton of your process. Thus, the first thing to be aware of is that a visual WF dia-

gram is executable code, not just simply a Visio-like static image. As such, WF is represented by a set

of .NET assemblies, namespaces, and types, just like any other .NET technology.

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