Just come out of a Dublin talk, and I've got to say that I'm very impressed. Dublin is a set of extensions to Windows Server / IIS to improve the ability to host and manage WCF and WF services. It's initial release is planned to be a web download, and should come out sometime soon after Visual Studio 2010.
So what's new? Once I get time to run the samples I'll go into some of this in more detail, but for now here are the highlights:
- Basic statistics available on Completed, In Progress and Suspended (i.e., in error) workflows
- Additional tracking information available to keep detailed information on a workflow instance
- From this, can see exactly why a suspended workflow is in that state, which will help no end in problem diagnosis
- Ability to resume workflows from the suspended state
- A new forwarding service that can perform routing and filtering of inbound requests to specific endpoints
- A worflow instance restart service that automatically resumes orphaned workflows
- Additional scalability features
- And everything can be programmatically accessed via PowerShell cmdlets
Now none of this is rocket science, and indeed much of it could (and has been) be done by hand. However, it's tedious to keep writing such plumbing code, and it's of very little (apparent) value to the end customer. It's great to see stuff like this making it into the base products.