Sunday, March 18, 2007 7:43 PM
One of the key parts of a SOA’s is the Business Process Logic Layer. One of the key technologies in this layer is Windows Workflow Foundation, one the key things that was missing from WF was support for BPEL so this called into question Microsoft commitment to the XML standard.
Anyway, I’m happy to report that BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP is available able from MSDN Download. With this add-on you will be able to import and export BPEL from WF.
Remember it is still in CTP so is officially it is an unsupported product but in my experience when I’ve had an issue with a CTP product in the past, Microsoft have always been more than helpful so don’t let this put you off from trying it out. But obviously backup or use it in a virtual environment rather than your own main one as insurance.
So the obvious question is will WF actually run BPEL? Well no, WF is a .NET based environment so BPEL is being converted, so WF isn’t a BPEL development environment in the strictest sense. I haven’t spoken to Paul Andrews (Technical Product Manager for WF at Microsoft) but my guess is interpreting BPEL on the fly isn’t fast as BPEL isn’t really built for speed of execution it’s about common language for business process execution but performance is critical so this is the trade-off.