Customer Reviews

Beginning WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 4.0 (Expert's Voice in .NET)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I know I said I would not consider using Windows Workflow until 2011 (google for "Good-bye Windows Workflow Foundation see you in 2011") but I at least wanted to check out the changes. This book is the ideal book for that. It goes into enough detail to give a very thorough understanding of what is going on with Windows Workflow 4.0.

The book is very well written and organized. It covers designer-based and code-based workflows, implementing SQL persistence, creating workflow extensions and custom activities, communicating with applications, long-running workflows, and workflows using WCF services.

The downloadable code is well organized and very usable.

All in all, this is a good book for getting into the guts of WF 4.0. It is a nice introduction.

This book has the advantage of being one of the first available for WF 4, but it is VERY basic. If you only plan to use WF by composing the built-in activities in the designer, then this might be fine for you. If what you want to do is create your own coded activities for you or others to use, then this book does not really provide much information.

I've been a .NET developer for quite a while - starting with version 1.1. I've kept up to date on almost all the developing technologies, language features and toolset that have emerged and evolved within the framework in that time. I feel like I've had a good grasp on most everything. Except Windows Workflow Foundation, or WF for short. I tried learning it in .NET 3.0/3.5, but never had my "a-ha!" moment. Most books and blog posts were "hello world" oriented, and never dove in to how to use WF in the real world - what does WF look like in a real application? If the books and posts weren't on the "hello world" level, they were too in-depth and difficult to follow. In short, it was tough to learn WF.

This is where I was when I picked up a copy of "Beginning WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 4.0" by Mark Collins. Beginning WF is the first book on WF that helped me really get it. It was a nice, gentle introduction to the fundamentals of WF. Perhaps part of the breakthrough I experienced while reading this book is due to the latest version of WF - WF 4 is a complete overhaul from previous versions - but I think more of it was the way Mark approached the subject. Mark assumes no previous experience with WF. As far as fundamentals go, he starts from scratch and explains the basics, while stepping the reader through some easy to follow examples (the finished products are available for download in case you get lost). I finished the first half of the book very confident in my ability to fire up Visual Studio 2010 and build a simple workflow.

However, I felt when he moved on to the more advanced topics, he stopped explaining them as well. Chapters on advanced fundamentals started immediately with the example. Learning by doing is a valid approach, and may work well for you, but I personally like a little more background information on the topic I'm working with. The chapter on SQL persistence is one that comes to mind. In this chapter we jump directly in to building the UI for the example that will demo SQL persistence, without a word on what SQL persistence is, what we use it for, and why we should care about how/when to work it in to a given application. Some of these answers come out in the example, but they aren't highlighted well - if you tend to skim tech books for the `meat' of the content, you'll have a hard time getting what you want from this book.

While the shallow treatment of advanced topics wasn't too compatible with my tech book reading style, I will say that he touched on a ton of topics. It's very unlikely that you'll be utilizing any part of WF in your first WF project that isn't covered in this book. It makes a really good attempt to bridge the gap from hello world to real world, including as an appendix a complete real-world application, showing what WF would look like in a real business process.

Beginning WF is the book that finally got me started with WF. So if you're looking just to get started, this is an excellent resource. This is almost a perfect WF book, and I would have given it 5 stars had the topics later in the book been discussed in theory (what is it, when do you use it, why should you care) before jumping directly in to how to use it. Still a solid title on my shelf, one which I'll lend out to people looking to create their first workflow.

Most of this book goes through the process of creating an app and building upon it. However most of the pages are just pasted code with little or no explanation over and above "Ok, now we'll create the..." (insert code). It's not even JUST the code to describe what needs to be done, it's literally all the code pasted again.
Moreover, the best part of WF4 is the slick new WPF designer which DOES bring this to beginners more easily...however 99% of the book deals with coded activities. Not that those aren't important, but show us some designer...the coded activities are so basic, it's not like we're being shown anything important.

The only relevant part of the book is Tracking, that chapter was beneficial.

Skip this book, and just spend a day on endpoint.tv

Uses examples to go through the different topics of workflow. The book does not provide much description to what goes on in workflow or the theory behind anything. All chapters gives an example on how to create a workflow that includes the topic of the chapter. All implementation is given to copy into the workflow and it can then be executed. It covers most of the topics in WF however it is definately not on of the best programming books I have read.

Look very much forward to reading the other books on WF 4.0.

Generally these kind of books are used for references. "How do I do this?" Look at the books reference and it explains the how and what. This book gives a brief explanation and then throws a large amount of code at you to interpret. This makes the book hard to use. If I had the time to go from page 1 to end start to finish then maybe it would be as of use.

The pro version looks like its in the format we all expect. I'll get that and see.

I have never used workflow and felt this book is a great introduction to the subject. The first few chapters cover the basics, introducing different components to slowly build and enhance the sample application in the book. It does take a little bit of effort to get through this portion because it is very rudimentary, but you do get a sense of how to build your own application.

Once we laid down the foundation we start using the tools we learned in the beginning and start using WF with WCF, and Workflow Service Host, which was exactly what I was looking for, and was excited to read. But instead of explaining stuff, it became just code samples and explained the output, not going into how it actually worked.

I would still recommend this book to get yourself familiar with workflow, and pick up a more advanced book to go into the details

It's got a good coverage of the basic features of workflow, but the code is verbose and hard to troubleshoot as a result. Since many chapters use code from previous chapters, if you can't get the code to run (as I wasn't able to in Chapter 9), you're sunk for the rest of the section.

This book is almost useless, it's just time waster. I've read it and realized I got too less out of it, less than I did reading 2-3 good MSDN articles. It covers only basic concepts and author made some technical inaccuracies throught the book.

The book is a series of tutorials similar to the Microsoft Step-by-Step series. If you're a .NET developer looking for a hands-on introduction to WF, you might want to check out this book.