I’m sitting here listening to the first session at Code Camp Oz 2006. Dan is talking on Windows Workflow Foundation which is a new workflow technology which targets the .NET platform and which has some snazzy designer capabilities in Visual Studio 2005.

Eventually WF will replace the orchestration technology used in future versions of BizTalk and it will be embedded into SharePoint v3 to support the workflow functions in that product.

What I love about it is that its a workflow engine that doesn’t really pretend to be more important than the program. What I mean by that is that unlike BizTalk you can slap everything you need for the workflow into an application assembly and ship. This means is that it has awesome scalability from a design point of view because you can use it as the backbone for a WPF Navigation Application, or you could use it in an enterprise scale order processing system.

I was very pleased that Dan touched on some of the pain points with the product at the moment where the abstraction seens to break down, including the extra work you need to do to maintain state across transactional workflows.

Thanks Dan – an awesome first session to Code Camp!