I think a nice example of a highly targeted workflow designer from Microsoft is the Outlook Rules Wizard – it’s a very nice, self-explanatory dialog for creating a filtering algorithm. If you want to expose configuration flexibility that has algorithmic decision-making power in it, that’s the kind of thing to go for, I think. Start with a clear problem definition, insert flexibility into it where necessary and guide the user through the resulting pattern, letting them fill in the blanks.

@daniel – OK, that’s totally fair. What about the WF enabling inside SharePoint? Do you think that is beyond the HR intern? I don’t think the Visual Studio designer is for BAs, either.

The only criticism I have is that you never define the acronym “WF”. Based on a tentative google search, I assume you mean “Workflow Foundation”, but I’m not a Windows developer, so it’s hard to say. Most of your target audience already knows what WF stands for, and for those that don’t, spelling it out doesn’t hurt.

Anyway, thanks again. Sorry I can’t comment on the actual point of the article, but I feel the introductory portions are spot on.

I was interested in WF (and remain interested in where it goes next) _precisely because_ it promised to give an easy-to-grasp UI to non-programmers to allow them to create custom business logic by plugging together components.

I was disappointed by it _precisely because_ it failed to deliver this. In all the useful demos I’ve seen, and in all attempts I’ve seen to make it work in practise, it was necessary for the end user to crank out some code-behind in VB or C#.

And the headline pitch you describe – “accessible to non-programmers” – completely collapsed when I spoke to the relevant folks at MS back in 1997. Here’s a blog post from Paul Andrews, PM at the time, that lays it on the line:

http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2007/01/16/how-does-windows-workflow-foundation-wf-compare-to-product-x.aspx

Key quote: “The workflow designer is best suited to developers, not business analysts.”

So what good is it? I’m already skilled in using real programming languages, and in return I can depend on proven techniques for code reuse (methods I can call, classes I can inherit, generic types I can instantiate, etc.), and I also get a state of the art debugging experience. If I try using WF, I get to use “experimental” code reuse features, and I get a crummy debugging experience.

Unless it opens up some aspect of the development process to non-programmers, deskilling it somehow, it has no purpose. Users who already know how to code will be better off writing elegant, readable code.

So I hope that this changes or is already changing for 4.0.