I’ve been looking a bit at .NET 4 Workflow Services as a part of AppFabric. I’m surprised to find no way to build these services from existing message contracts. I can understand imposing limitations on doing so – even that there might be no reasonable tool support – but this is a real stumbling block.
Certainly contract-first is not the only way to build services, but it is if you are implementing a published standard. Maybe there is some way to tinker around with the output of the tools sets to make a Workflow Service compatible with some existing WSDL, but would it be worth it?
One answer might be to put a pure WCF facade over the Workflow Services. Kind of a headache, but maybe workable.
This makes me think that .NET 4 Workflow Services are really targeted to be internal to the enterprise or at least where contract definition is flexible and controlled by one entity.
This follows a standard Microsoft pattern: help the enterprise dev in V1 and then expand from there. This strategy makes sense, I just want it all in VS 2010, not in V.next.
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