Yesterday night, I watched a WebCast from TechEd Boston - "An Overview of ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation". What this innocuous title hid was the fact that Kashif Alam (PM in the Developer Division) was presenting vNext features for ASP.NET workflow integration: Page flow (PageFlow) as well as UI flow (UIFlow), plus the accompanying extensibility model.
What do those two separate approaches provide? Well, you get MVC (model-view-controller) support for same-page (UIFlow) as well as cross-page (PageFlow) scenarios. Pretty neat was the included "Choosing the right solution" slide to get an idea what's in store:
Task |
<asp:wizard...> |
PageFlow |
UIFlow |
Single page |
x |
|
x |
Multiple pages |
|
x |
|
State when close browser |
|
x |
x |
Integrate with Enterprise WF |
|
x |
x |
Client support |
|
x |
x |
Built-in navigation UI |
x |
|
|
Extensibility to other controllers |
|
x |
x |
As developers, we will get our hands on this later this year in the form of the "ASP.NET PageFlow CTP" (at least that's the current name), and it will be deployed with Orcas.
NetFx3 is the new community site that focuses on the four .Net Framework 3.0 technologies Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace.