Microsoft® Windows® Workflow Foundation Step by Step

Foreword

To me, workflow engines such as Microsoft BizTalk always seemed like a really expensive thing that I didn’t need for many projects. I always thought, "How hard can it be to actually code the logic you draw on the screen?" As a result, I spent a lot of time not learning what a workflow engine could do for me and, instead, lived with "just code." Still, I was intrigued and would bug my friends about what they saw as the value of BizTalk. They would usually get me excited enough to try installing the product and learning how it worked. Every time I tried to make the plunge and learn how to use BizTalk, I backed away because it seemed too complex for what I perceived as a flowchart execution engine.

Sometime around 2003, while working at Microsoft ...