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.
Plans changed yet again….sigh. Tonight was the Universal Studio conference party. I had really looked forward to going. There was an accident down near where the buses were staging near the conference center and they couldn’t get the buses moving. I stood in line in front of the hotel for about an hour. Two or three buses had managed to take some people but when I got into the line it was already wrapping around the side of the building.
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.