Jelle Druyts

Introduction

Although the first keynote on Tuesday already ran way over time, Eric Rudder still found plenty more to talk about in the second keynote today. The main announcements were:

• Windows Workflow Foundation: this natural extension to the .NET Framework enables developers to incorporate both System Workflow as Human Workflow into their applications. Microsoft is actually using this themselves in their next versions of SharePoint and Office "12".
• Microsoft Expression: this is a suite of designer tools (codenamed Acrylic, Sparkle and Quartz) aimed at graphics and web designers.
• Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA): think of this as the next version of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but of course now within the managed .NET runtime. So this technology enables application customization in .NET, and it's already committed to by its integration into Office InfoPath "12".

Windows Workflow Foundation

The main statement that caught my attention was that "Workflow is everywhere": every "if" statement you write is a branch that effectively represents a lightweight workflow step; every webpage transition is a choice you make and can be modeled in a workflow.

So Windows Workflow Foundation sets out to capture complex workflows, expose them to developers and enable on-the-fly extensions to them for added flexibility. Although this sounds impressive, in the end, all it is is "just another .NET namespace": you can execute all of this through managed classes. Furthermore, you can design the workflows right in Visual Studio, very much like you can model Biztalk orchestrations right now.

As a small remark (but I think this is quite big news), it was noted that Microsoft will be providing the tools to embed these workflow designers inside your own applications, so your end users will also benefit from this runtime.

As a demo, we were shown how this currently works: there's a new project type in Visual Studio, you can define the state machine in a visual designer which is persisted as a .xoml file and you can program the individual activities through managed classes. Furthermore, the entire development experience supported since you can visually set breakpoints in your workflow designer and it will just work in the debugger. Incredibly powerful!

Microsoft Expression

Acrylic is a tool that allows you to create vector-based graphics and export them as XAML.

Quartz Web Designer allows a web designer to create ASP.NET ASPX and master pages in a rich designer environment that supports XML/XSLT and even ASP.NET controls with their full design-time power (such as smart tags). It even features a built-in web server that runs your website locally.

Sparkle is basically a XAML designer that uses the same project and MSBuild system as Visual Studio.

The last two tools actually make me wonder how large the overlap is with Visual Studio: since they share so many features (designers, web server, project system, build system, ...), I would think that the tools are just customized and "skinned" versions of Visual Studio, but targeted at non-developers...

Visual Studio Tools for Applications

The VSTA platform looks promising, and we were shown a demo that showed the runtime in action in a special build of AutoCAD, but there wasn't really much info available on the runtime or on the capabilities of the platform. I'm sure we will hear much more about this in the near future, since VBA is still one of the most used extension platforms for a lot of applications.

Office 12

During the second part of the keynote, more time was dedicated to showcasing the upcoming Office "12" release. The user experience seems much improved, but unfortunately, we won't be able to get our hands on it for a few months yet. For PDC attendees, this is truly a shame, since we're all quite thrilled about it and they're hyping it all up, but we need to wait a few months before we can actually start using it...

Some random notes from the Office 12 part:

• SharePoint (Windows SharePoint Services as well as SharePoint Portal Server) is positioned as the core element of the entire Office System.
• Office 12 will have blogs and wiki's as part of the collaboration framework. You heard it right, blogs and wiki's!
• You can think of the new FrontPage as a designer or management tool for SharePoint, e.g. you can use it to define new workflows (which are of course also persisted as .xoml files).
• You can finally use InfoPath forms over the web! Another cool feature was that you can now store and share design snippets for reusable parts of your InfoPath forms. Nice!

So that wrapped up the second keynote, less interesting (apart from the Windows Workflow Services) but nevertheless lots of promise for the future.