11. Workflow Services

AT THIS POINT IN THE BOOK, you already know that WCF is all about services—it’s about defining, building, and securing services. Services have well-defined boundaries formally described in their contract, but the inner workings are entirely opaque outside the service. WCF says little about the service implementation; it simply provides the interfaces to reliably and securely exchange messages with clients.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is complementary technology to WCF. It’s all about defining and executing activities of a multistep process (a.k.a. workflow). WF can model workflows that are sequential or event-driven in nature. The WF runtime executes activities by branching, looping, forking, and joining the execution ...

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