Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 4 [Paperback]

Pro WF is everything both a WF novice and expert could ask for. While Workflow Foundation 4 could be considered a V1 product in some ways, Bruce writes about it as if he's been working with it for years. The examples he describes are well thought out and make sense from a "real application" perspective. He also does a great job explaining some of the concepts such as custom activities, and workflow services with ease and in a manner that is absorable first read through. My only criticism would be that he doesn't discuss building non-service workflow services.

If you read no other chapter in this book except one, Chapter 16 - Advanced Custom Activities is a must.

While the book seems thorough, for getting your feet wet it takes too long. From my perspective, and it might well be that I'm overly used to other author styles, the flow (not intended) seems to get bogged down in minutiae instead of getting to the point. Just in the first chapter there's an awful lot of elementary notes, steps, and unnecessary details that make it seem like this is really aimed at newer developers, not just those new to Workflow Foundation. I prefer a style that covers 75%, or gives me the gist, upfront so I can jump in quickly and that progressively gets into lesser-known aspects or different ways to do the same thing as the book goes on. The "Hello World" program should not take ~8 pages. It was a little jarring.

Some glaringly obvious printing errors and even a content error (in just the first chapter) are jarring as well. Text in virtually all of the diagrams don't line up properly. If it happened once I can ignore it, but the same goof shows up in every one. In one of the step-by-step examples, a step was completely left out! I read and re-read the example to be sure and the step was never explicitly stated, yet later in the example it simply appears in the screenshot and is discussed as though it had been done. These errors in detail make it seem sloppy and rushed.

I also don't like the style of interspersing paragraphs among example steps. I prefer a step-by-step example to be just that, not pause in between steps to belabor a point that's more or less obvious, much less to insert 'sideline' commentary that's not immediately pertinent to the step. I would rather get through the example and -then- read on.

All that said I am going to keep it and use it for reference. It has worked for learning Workflow Foundation but it did not get me going very quickly (as I was hoping) and some of it was kind of a slog.

This tome builds on the previous edition of the book updated for WWF4. WWF4 is much improved over WWF 3.5, so the examples are specific to the new version. There's lots of detailed discussion centered around walkthrough examples.

There is a serious flaw with this printing of the book in that all of the table layouts are incorrectly aligned. The contents of the first column of the tables are truncated and then pushed into the second column, so the alignment of each table is off. This makes the tables very hard to read. Most of the examples list the variables that you need to create by using tables, so it slows you down a great deal.