October 13, 2005
.net
How is “workflow” different from “visual programming?”
Is there something intrinsic about "workflow" that needs to be surfaced to folks or would any visual programming language do? I'm not finding any commercial products in my web searches, but I know that there have been some "integrated component"-style programming languages where you lay flow and logic out from a set of components on a toolbox. Is Windows Workflow Foundation one of those that MS just happens to be doing or is there something important about "workflow" that interests folks?
What interests you about Windows Workflow Foundation?
The PDC was a buzz with folks praising WWF. Please tell me a) what you think is cool about WWF and b) how it will improve your life or the lives of your colleagues or customers. Thanks!
John Gossman on Model/View/ViewModel
John Gossman, architect on the Sparkle team, has just made a post about how Sparkle uses data binding to hook up the view of the data to the data itself.
Interestingly, his post isn’t about whether they used data binding — that’s a foregone conclusion. Data binding is so powerful that pretty much every non-trivial Avalon app will use it, and Sparkle (a large app with a very rich UI) uses the hell out of it.
The main thrust of the Model/View/ViewModel architecture seems to be that on top of the data (“the Model”), there’s another layer of non-visual components (“the ViewModel”) that map the concepts of the data more closely to the concepts of the view of the data (“the View”). It’s the ViewModel that the View binds to, not the Model directly.
I’ve been a fan of value converters (implementations of IValueConverter) for this kind of work, but John’s technique has its charms, not least that it allows for much more radical slicing and dicing than value converters allow easily.
