Essential WF (the book)
Download Sample Chapter
Download Chapter 3, “Activity Execution”, here
Table of Contents
The organization of the book is as follows.
Chapter 1, “Deconstructing WF”, examines the key ideas that underpin the WF programming model: bookmarks, continuations, thread and process agility, passivation, resumable program statements, and a runtime for resumable programs. These ideas are discussed in their barest form, outside the context of WF, to maximize the clarity of the discussions. Chapter 2, “WF Programs”, maps the concepts introduced in the first chapter onto the richer programming surface of WF, and therefore acts as a bridge to the rest of the book. Here we begin developing activities, composing them into simple WF programs, and running those programs. Chapters 3, “Activity Execution,” and 4, “Advanced Activity Execution,” discuss detailed aspects of how activities execute including book-marking, fault handling, cancellation, and compensation. The unifying theme is the activity automaton that describes the lifecycle of all activities. Chapter 5, “Applications,” explores how to build applications that host the WF runtime and leverage its points of extensibility. Chapter 6, “Transactions,” discusses the critical role of transactions in the execution of WF programs. Chapter 7, “Advanced Authoring,” covers a number of advanced topics related to activity and WF program authoring, including validation and compilation, and Chapter 8, “Miscellanea,” introduces several feature areas of WF that are built around the previously discussed core concepts. Appendix A, “Activity Automaton,” is a reference for the activity automaton. Appendix B, “Control Flow Patterns,” presents the code for several composite activities that are more complex than those developed in the main text. These examples highlight extensibility points of the WF programming model, and demonstrate the capability of composite activities to capture complex control flow patterns.
Sample Code
Download the activities covered in the book here.











