Walking towards a more visual based programming paradigm (Workflow Foundation)

Workflow Foundation is a lightweight platform provided by Microsoft as part of it's .NET framework, to implement process driven solutions on top of it (stressing the...on top of it part, it's a low level foundation technology). It provides a visual designer embedded in Visual Studio enabling drag n drop based programming of logic components. It represents a visual language on which we can build the nouns and verbs the business speaks in, and doing so while remaining inside Visual Studio which is a top of the line development environment. In other words a platform upon we could build our own domain specific visual languages, that could range from document management solutions to mash up engines.

In 2006 the first version of this technology was released and it was going to change the world, and while it didn't it introduced some interesting concepts and it represents a serious investment in a trend that we think is bound to succeed in the long run. Visual modeling of behavior for specific parts of the system, with scopes narrow enough to maintain the complexity levels low, has the potential to increase the abstraction level to a point even the business user is able to express meaning without having to go through an IT guy. In a similar way as the content management systems opened the doors to end user content generation, Domain Specific Languages will open the door for user generated behavior, and Workflow Foundation may have a role to play in that.

In a month the second version of this technology is due for release, along with the new framework version 4.0. We've been investing on this technology since the beginning, and it's encouraging to see that Microsoft is using it as the foundation for several products, such as: SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's CRM, and BizTalk.

We are already building on the new version, and even though it's been completely rebuilt loosing backwards compatibility with the former one, we understand the new object model is cleaner, and simpler to grasp, and simple is good :) We expect some features present in the former version not included so far in the new one, such as state machines gets supported in the near future.

Time will tell what the level of adoption of this new version will be, and this in turn will determine our strategy to use and/or complement it in the best way possible, probably extending it for specific domains and scenarios. Business processes automation problems are everywhere, and the demand for user generated behavior is rising, since the cost to implement solutions with this sort of features is falling.

(this post is the fourth in a series titled technology watch for 2010)