Question

I heard from a friend that Microsoft rewrote all the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) again and changed everything was in .Net 3.5.

Is that true?

And what about what we learned about WF in 3.0 and 3.5?

Answer 1

According to this article:

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2009/01/01/windows-workflow-changes-direction.aspx

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 is a “bottom-up rewrite with entirely new thinking…WF 3.0/3.5 will remain part of the framework and will run side by side with WF 4.0. This lets you manage the transition at a time that fits your organization’s broader goals.”

…which is code for, “We know we just screwed up your programming model, but we have a long term strategy, so we hope you will forgive us.”

The article goes on to say that

The gains are enormous: custom
activities take center stage, and
authoring them is much simpler;
workflows are entirely declarative;
and there are three workflow flow
styles that you can combine
seamlessly. It’s possible that you
could see a 10-fold improvement in the
time required to create and debug
workflows, in addition to 10- to
100-fold runtime performance
improvements.

The change is not without its detractors. In this article at DotNetKicks, the author states that “Microsoft is seriously damaging the Dot Net developer community and adoption in the industry with these half baked product releases and abrupt about-faces after shipping.”

Which is why I generally wait for the 2.0 or 3.0 version of Microsoft technologies, although I made an exception for ASP.NET MVC.