Pro Wf 4.5 [Paperback]

The .NET Workflow framework is ideal for a niche market and is not for everyone. Consequently, a lot of the documentation for it on the web and in publications has been poor. This is a rather unfortunate thing because when used for the right reasons, .NET Workflows can do wonders! In my workplace we use it for sophisticated approval processes with business rules that are often subject to change.

In the book's introduction, the author writes:

"I have taken pains to make sure that this book does not leave WF beginners in the dark, while showing experienced developers how to use its very latest features to accomplish practical tasks."

Upon reading that statement and some excellent samples from the first few chapters, I bought this with hopes that it would be the definitive book on workflows. For the most part, Mr. White does an okay job explaining the basic of Workflows. White's chapter on State Machines is superbly done. However, once you reach the more advanced concepts starting with Chapter 6 and beyond, things begin to fall apart. I was especially disappointed in the topics on Persistence, Tracking, and custom designing your WF activities using WPF.

In some chapters, the book assumes an advanced knowledge of .NET topics. For example, an early chapter on Flowchart workflows uses Entity Framework quite heavily. I honestly feel that introducing other advanced .NET topics, especially without a thorough explanation about them, is a distraction to the topic at hand and is poor practice. Another case is where White uses WCF activities in basic examples to explain topics like versioning and persistence. Mind you, WCF activities are not even discussed until near the end of the book! White makes a habit of not explaining why and how we implement these features properly. I did take initiative to download the sample code from the publisher site to see if I could get a clear understand of what White's intentions were. However, upon looking, I noticed that code for chapters were miscategorized. For instance, Chapter 6's code is in the Chapter 5 subfolder! Chapter 9's subfolder has NO code samples! Really? How could something this simple be botched?

Then finally there are the step-by-step how-to guides in the book that you're supposed to follow along and copy. One of the most frustrating things I've encountered is how variables and arguments are declared but are then used in later steps UNDER A DIFFERENT NAME!!! It's as if the author decided to rename them at the last minute but forgot to go back and update the original name from early steps! This issue doesn't happen once, it happens quite often. There are also key steps that have been omitted that leave you puzzled when you attempt to run the code and it fails.

I in no way doubt Mr. White's knowledge in workflows and .NET. He is a well respected figure within the IT community here in Northeast Florida. However, his book is very...very...very poorly edited and it fails to deliver. I can understand the occasional mistake in a technical book but this is INEXCUSABLE. Frankly speaking, if I had written a publication like this back in college or high-school, I would have had the book thrown back at me with a zero.

In the end, I cannot fathom how this print got past the Apress editors. It feels like it was written hastily just to be the first WF 4.5 book on the market. I have both the physical and digital editions of this book. The book was clearly intended for digital reading since the physical version is of poor binding and the blurry illustrations are hard to decipher.

If you are new to Workflows, I recommend reading Bruce Bukovic's book on WF 4 also from Apress. That book has a few flaws too and there are some significant changes to workflows between version 4 and 4.5. However, Bukovic's book is good enough to get the ball rolling.

It is fine that the printed code examples are not full examples (you need to download the full examples). But I think there were better code specimens that should have been printed instead. I had to re-read some of the examples several times and infer what was happening. I feel some more "Why" questions should have been answered.

This book did manage to take me from knowing zilch to making WF do something. It is also very up to date which is important with WF (since so much has changed in 4.5).

Finally, WF 4.5 works and maintains context and now has good scalability. WF is also integrated flawlessly with WCF 4.5. This is a great book to introduce the WF programmer to 4.5. Thanks, Amazon for a timely delivery as well.