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Comment by meaty | Hacker News Reader

Same trouble here and I'm getting pissed off with it.

We got fucked by Windows Workflow and Silverlight, both of which were canned. The former was rewritten completely but didn't support our use cases any more.

The main thing for me is that I have to relearn every damn API every 6 months to keep up.

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Not for nothing but Windows Workflow was always a go nowhere tech, to be honest. The best thing is to have a good foundation in fundamentals and don't get so bogged down in API. If a tech has an extremely complicated API and it is not doing something specialized like control a space shuttle then it might be best to look elsewhere. Anyway, I just feel like Windows Workflow was something only the most Microsoft infused government programming firm could love.

Workflow is one of those great examples of Microsoft building and ditching platforms/technologies. They've gone through almost as many cycles there as they have with data access technologies.

It's actually pretty nice.

We have some cool stuff deployed with it (long term service correlation, long running background processes, custom workflows for business processes), but you are right about it being complicated. We're in the financial sector so workflow and process management is king to us.

The API is there for us to not have to do all the legwork. Do you know how complicated it is to produce a workflow engine and do you know how many companies have their own half broken workflow engines?

Just curious how you got fucked by Workflow Foundation? We use it in our app. We haven't moved to .NET 4.5 yet, so not sure if this some looming issue not on out radar, or perhaps you used it in a specific way no longer supported?

We built a massive state machine based workflow in WF3. It has limped along until .Net 4.0, but we've hit a brick wall now as they have killed the following assemblies in .Net 4.5 (all legacy WF3/3.5 assemblies basically):

    System.Workflow.Activities.dll
    System.Workflow.ComponentModel.dll
    System.Workflow.Runtime.dll
    System.WorkflowServices.dll
    Microsoft.Workflow.DebugController.dll
    Microsoft.Workflow.Compiler.exe
    Wfc.exe

Our 4.5 upgrade prospects are going to be problematic I think as we've got to port everything to the WF4 process model and runtime before we can drag everything up.

I've heard a lot of poeple say "just leave it as 4.0", but we've been there since day one with .Net 1.0 and I'll tell you it's not fun being on the support trailing edge when you have to do a massive port.

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