WF in the Cloud …

The last session of the conference I went to was on deploying & running WFs in the Cloud (aka Azure).

Azure is able to host a number of different services : .NET Services; Live Services (part of MS Live data eg credentials contacts etc etc) & SQL Services. WFs are hosted directly inside a runtime provided by the .NET Services bit. More about Azure …      

  Azure

Currently only a sub-set of the existing WF (3.5) Activities are supported . However there are some extra ones there too, to take advantage of the Azure framework. Only Framework v 3.5 & v4.0 are supported at the moment & only XAML WF’s as well (deep sigh!). You can directly manage your workflow instances & types either through the Azure portal or via APIs on you client machine that talks to the Azure platform thru it’s Service Bus (this is Azure’s Controller Service). So either way you can  directly manage your workflow instance eg  Create, Suspend, Resume & Terminate … pretty cool! …. had to write a lot of extra code to do this in Rio

 Well enough for now …….. we’re off to Vegas !   😀