Workflow and state machines are defined nicely on wikipedia. I’m guessing you’re getting the term State Machine Workflow from this page. .NET seems to support different ways of modeling workflows (which are just some defined steps in a complex human task). A state machine (which is a map of states with transitions between them) would … Read more
As I work through this, I’ll try to list some of the things I’m finding. Most will likely be a bit superficial from an analysis standpoint (especially since I’m new to both frameworks), but hopefully it will help someone out. Stateless Pros open source syntactically concise and easy to read pretty good examples in the … Read more
The choice to use WF takes some evaluation and I’m going to try and provide a fairly comprehensive list here on what the pros and cons are. Keep in mind that if you’re going to use WF don’t use anything other than WF4+ because it was rewritten and is significantly vetted past its predecessors. Pros … Read more
Windows Workflow Foundation is a very capable product but still very much in its 1st version 🙁 The main reasons for use include: Visually modeling business requirements. Separating your business logic from the business rules and externalizing rules as XML files. Separating your business flow from your application by externalizing your workflows as XML files. … Read more
I have used http://codeplex.com/simplestatemachine in one production system successfully (an ASP.NET system for handling 350+ different government business license issuance). A simple state machine is implemented in Boo, so we just expose the definition in a text file which the system administrator can modify. In the editor we do verification to make sure the editing … Read more
From the perspective of a non-expert, there are two things that to me make the case for WF — one unique to workflow platforms, the other perhaps more of a convenience thing. The convenience feature is the ability to create new ways of composing activities. Imperative programming provides only a limited repertoire of composition primitives: … Read more
I assume you meant DependencyProperty.Register and DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached. DependencyProperty.Register is used to register normal DependencyProperty. You can see those as just regular properties, with the added twist that they can take part in WPF’s DataBinding, animations etc. In fact, they are exposed as normal property (with the get and set accessors) on top of the untyped … Read more
The only explanation I found helpful and well written is this one: http://www.wpftutorial.net/dependencyproperties.html Basically, DependencyProperties differ from regular properties in that they’re not just setters / getters for fields in the class, but they retrieve their actual values dynamically during runtime. The SetValue() method of DPs is pretty straightforward and sets the local value of … Read more
You may need WF only if any of the following are true: You have a long-running process. You have a process that changes frequently. You want a visual model of the process. For more details, see Paul Andrew’s post: What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for? Please do not confuse or relate WF with visual … Read more