The general session today was given by Eric Rudder and Steven Sinofsky. I’ve already blogged about the Expressions announcement, so I’ll just hit some of the other highlights.
Eric announced the Windows Workflow Foundation. VSTA, Visual Studio Tools for Applications allows you to embed .Net language code hooks into your application to allow for extensibility. Think like VBA in the current office package. They showed a version of AutoCad - AutoDesk, that was using this already.
Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation
So Microsoft has finally found purchase in the WWF…or rather they have invented a new meaning to the acronym.
WWF was announced this morning in the keynote as a new framework to provide APIs to create, manage, and implement workflow in your applications. This is just a “helper” and is not a product. It’s an extension to the .Net framework and is itself very extensible.
This breakout session dealt with how you can stage the migration of your existing applications using COM+ and MSMQ to WCF. I won’t get into great detail with this one, thought it was a very good session.
Andy Milligan from Microsoft presented along with another man I didn’t catch the name for.
He presented a scenario where a company had legacy VB6 components hosted in COM+ and a Windows Service that was taking messages off the queue and processing them.