Customer Reviews

Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 4.0

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pro WF is everything both a WF novice and expert could ask for. While Workflow Foundation 4 could be considered a V1 product in some ways, Bruce writes about it as if he's been working with it for years. The examples he describes are well thought out and make sense from a "real application" perspective. He also does a great job explaining some of the concepts such as custom activities, and workflow services with ease and in a manner that is absorable first read through. My only criticism would be that he doesn't discuss building non-service workflow services.

If you read no other chapter in this book except one, Chapter 16 - Advanced Custom Activities is a must.

I bought all WF 4 books available on the market, but this is the only book that I constantly come back for answers. The author covered the topics of custom activities really well. I now know how to design a non-trivial custom activity using all the techniques outlined in the book (ActivityDesigner, NativeActivity, etc).

This tome builds on the previous edition of the book updated for WWF4. WWF4 is much improved over WWF 3.5, so the examples are specific to the new version. There's lots of detailed discussion centered around walkthrough examples.

There is a serious flaw with this printing of the book in that all of the table layouts are incorrectly aligned. The contents of the first column of the tables are truncated and then pushed into the second column, so the alignment of each table is off. This makes the tables very hard to read. Most of the examples list the variables that you need to create by using tables, so it slows you down a great deal.

While the book seems thorough, for getting your feet wet it takes too long. From my perspective, and it might well be that I'm overly used to other author styles, the flow (not intended) seems to get bogged down in minutiae instead of getting to the point. Just in the first chapter there's an awful lot of elementary notes, steps, and unnecessary details that make it seem like this is really aimed at newer developers, not just those new to Workflow Foundation. I prefer a style that covers 75%, or gives me the gist, upfront so I can jump in quickly and that progressively gets into lesser-known aspects or different ways to do the same thing as the book goes on. The "Hello World" program should not take ~8 pages. It was a little jarring.

Some glaringly obvious printing errors and even a content error (in just the first chapter) are jarring as well. Text in virtually all of the diagrams don't line up properly. If it happened once I can ignore it, but the same goof shows up in every one. In one of the step-by-step examples, a step was completely left out! I read and re-read the example to be sure and the step was never explicitly stated, yet later in the example it simply appears in the screenshot and is discussed as though it had been done. These errors in detail make it seem sloppy and rushed.

I also don't like the style of interspersing paragraphs among example steps. I prefer a step-by-step example to be just that, not pause in between steps to belabor a point that's more or less obvious, much less to insert 'sideline' commentary that's not immediately pertinent to the step. I would rather get through the example and -then- read on.

All that said I am going to keep it and use it for reference. It has worked for learning Workflow Foundation but it did not get me going very quickly (as I was hoping) and some of it was kind of a slog.

The material in this book is well presented and so far covers .Net Work Flow in detail, but every table in the book is not properly formatted. You would think the publisher could have fixed this before they produced so many copies of this book. APress gets zero stars.

Great book. Lots of code examples. I recommend using this book and the VS 2010 training kit as a way to jump start developemnt using WF 4 in VS 2010.

The pro:
There are not enough documentation about WF4 on the web at the moment. This book contains a lot of valuable information that can shorten your time in learning and applying WF4. Samples are good as well.
The con:
Advance features such as custom activity are not enough. This is what developers need in solving complex problems.

This book is very well written and covers the topics I needed to understand. Better explanations here than anywhere else I could find discussing WF 4, and by a wide margin. Thank you for this book! Though the WF product has its shortcomings, the author of this book shouldn't be accredited the blame for that!

However it is a major disappointment there is no Kindle version of this book. I just don't understand that at all -- there is simply no good reason for it. It is now essential to me I be able to read my computer books on my iPad. Carrying heavy books to and from work, or even worse on a business trip, is just about intolerable. Minus 1 star just for that.

This is a good book on WF 4 and probably the best one on the market. But, as other reviewers have pointed out, the table layouts are messed up and the print/ink quality is low (looks like pages have been run through a copy machine then glued together).

The book is good. But I was not aware that Microsoft skipped on State Machine Model in the WF4. I was disappointed after learning that. Author mentions that State Machine is definitely a needed feature in future versions, at the same time also tries to explain how to achieve similar functionality using other models that are present in WF4. MS does plan to bring State Machine back but they have not given any time line.