The release of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team Systems marked a major revision to the .NET development experience. It brought us code snippets, custom project templates, refactoring, data binding wizards, smart tags, modeling tools, automated testing tools, and project and task management—to name just a few features. Visual Studio 2008 builds on these tools and provides additional core changes and additions to the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). The languages have many new improvements, the Framework has a number of additions, and the tools have been significantly enhanced. For instance, Visual Studio 2008 includes such things as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for building richer client solutions, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to help build more dynamic service-oriented solutions, and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to enable structured programming around business processes. In addition, there are language enhancements such as the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and team systems enhancements such as code metrics, performance profiling, and a revised team build system. All of these tools are meant to increase your productivity and success rate. This book is meant to help you unlock the many tools built into Visual Studio so that you can realize these gains.

Write Connected, Service-Oriented Solutions

Write Connected, Service-Oriented Solutions
Many business applications involve specific processes, or workflows, around documents, records, and related data. These business processes typically involve staged review and approval by business personnel; they might also require communication between various systems. A business process is also typically long-running—meaning the process is not a simple, single execution but rather a multistep process that has to "wait" before moving to the next step.
Building these processes into business application was typically a lot of custom development work with little guidance, or it meant tying your application to third-party tools. Web services helped but developers lacked an easy way to build them with support for multiple protocols, different transports, strong security, and transactional support.
Visual Studio 2008 now provides in-the-box (and in the .NET Framework) support for building business processes as workflows and reliably integrating them with other applications, systems, and partners. This section takes a look at Windows Workflow (WF) for defining reusable business process and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for unlocking that business process across system boundaries.