My latest publishing project, which I haven't talked about much on the blog, is a LiveLesson training DVD on WF. This product has now released and you can find all the details here:

http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0321503139

It contains about 5 hours of video instruction on the breadth of WF, including sequential workflows, state machine workflows, showing how to use each of the base activity library activities, how to communicate with workflows, how to handle exceptions, custom activities, and much more. Because of the length of the instruction, it is more of a shallow dive into each of the topics to get you started, rather than being very deep in any one area. The content is mostly Camtasia screen capture while demonstrating the techniques being discussed.

There is also a sample lesson available through YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/livelessons

If you are getting started using WF, this would be a good way to get bootstrapped.

Spread the word!

I gave a talk on WPF for ASP.NET developers this evening at the .NET SIG in Cleveland. Good size crowd and great questions. It was a challenging talk because of trying to cover all of WPF and Silverlight for ASP.NET developers and for those in the crowd who were Windows Forms developers.

I covered the various deployment models of WPF including:

- Windows Application

- XAML Browser Application (XBAP)

- Plain Old XAML Page (POXP?)

- Silverlight App

Whenever I present this stuff, the overwhelming reaction is: Stop giving us so many choices!!! We can't figure out what to use when!

There is also often a desire for a conclusion to be drawn that one of these will be the end state and all UI will be written in it. I just don't think that will be the case. I think that maybe 5 years from now, if the tools come along a lot farther than they are now, and if the control suite grows, the list of options could shorten to just WPF Windows App, Silverlight App, and ASP.NET AJAX app. But I don't think it will shrink beyond that. Windows Apps make sense when you control the desktop to take maximum advantage of the client platform and give the best user experience. Silverlight makes sense for broader reach while sticking to the same tools and programming models. ASP.NET AJAX will be broader still and will address the platforms that Silverlight can't reach, and will also (like Windows Forms) be more evolved for data over forms apps for a while to come.

Anyway, here are the slides and demos for those who are interested:

Slides    Demos

A quick ditty on what sessions I'm presenting at DevConnections this week. Expect sample code in a couple days.

A quick gushing review of Adam Nathan's WPF Unleashed

WPF episode on dnrTV available

NOVA Code Camp coming in April

Slides and demos from VS Connections in Vegas

Some thoughts on the relative importance / need for adoption of WCF, WF, WPF, and CardSpace

Quick summary of what was covered, slides and demos links for the WF and WPF talks on our roadshow

.NET 3.0 Release Candidate is out!! http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/downloads/products/getthebeta/

Some thoughts on the complexity of WF basics...