More exciting news out of PDC today - the formal announcement of the
Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). Visit the link from my previous sentence and you will find plenty of information and even a hands-on lab you can do. A basic overview (that won't do it justice) would be a comparison to BizTalk's functionality. Well, that's not entirely accurate, but you can programmatically create sequential or state-based workflows, leverage a rules engine, and have the ability to communicate with other endpoints such as Web services as a part of WinFX known as the base activity library. Also, there will be a nice designer hosted in Visual Studio 2005 that will be very familiar to you if you ahve used BizTalk 2004 with Visual Studio .NET. Early looks so far show a designer much like that of the orchestration designer for BizTalk. This will be a huge selling point for Office 12 and SharePoint. All of this stuff should attract plenty of developers: WinFX as an API built into Windows, SharePoint (SPS) built into Windows, LINQ, and now WWF with its BizTalk-like functionality. It should be a fun next couple of years! :-)
