WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP1 Released

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The WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP1 is released on CodePlex NOW!!  Please check it out.

Last year in PDC2009, I ran a chalk talk on our work on WF 4 State Machine Activities and promised the team would ship an implementation for public review after the release of Visual Studio 2010.  Today, I am so excited to let you know that we have delivered it on CodePlex as planned.

This CTP contains a state machine runtime and a graphical state machine designer implementation, and they are optimized to handle event-driven scenarios.   We simplified the runtime object model and enhanced the designer experience so that handling transitions among states should be more intuitive and require fewer clicks or drag-and-drops comparing to WF3. In WF 4, we have also introduced the Flowchart modeling style. State Machine and Flowchart styles are highly complementary. They are suitable for different scenarios. We will talk more about that in future blogs.

So, go ahead to download and install the bits. The user guide is a good starting point.  If you are interested in how it is implemented, you can download the source code. For WF 3 users, you can find the comparison between the state machine in WF3 and this CTP in the user guide.  And the team will continue to blog about different features such as composite states, conditional transition, etc… 

Your feedback is important to us.  We would like to understand more about your State Machine scenarios to build the State Machine right for your business needs.  So, please be encouraged to validate the implementation with your scenarios and let us know how it fits or doesn’t fit your scenarios.

state machine

Alan Ko (alanko@microsoft.com)

Program Manager (The WF team)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2011
    Dear Alan Ko, Hi, Alan. I found your blog “WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP1 Released”. And I did some try following the user guide. I am so interesting in the demo you showed in the image at the bottom of the blog. And could I get this demo source code as the example for WF 4.0 State Machine? Or is there a similar example I can get? Thank you very much!

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2011
    Hi Alan, I am trying to create some custom activities that  have connectors like the state machine. I’ve been trying to get some sample code and every forum I find a lead points me to the Activity pack that was released last year. Has it been taken off the codeplex site because it is now released as part of a .Net framework platform update? Would you happen to have any sample code to create activities with connectors? Thanks in advance.