TechEd 2006 - Day 1

Yesterday was my first full day ever at a TechEd conference. The first part of it was blown working with customer issues, so it wasn’t until the afternoon that I got to go to my first session. Which was a talk on how to get Windows Workflow and Windows Communications Foundation to work together. Actually, not so much on how, but what’s possible.

I thought it was an interesting talk. Well structure and a good blend between technical demos and the story that you need to keep audiences going (which, as an aside, was what was lacking from the keynote…but that’s another issue). Because I’ve already played with the technology, the fact that it was about level 200 meant that there wasn’t much new in terms of the details. In fact, I left with one question that I still need to get answered. One that deals with threading.

Over the course of the presentation demos were shown to illustrate starting a workflow using a WCF (web service, basically) call and how a workflow can call out using WCF. In other words, there is no question that these two pieces of technology know how to talk together. The question I was left with dealt with starting up a workflow using a WCF call. Specifically, who manages the threads that need to be generated. Is it IIS spawning a separate request? Is it the WF host creating a new thread? And what level of thread-safety do I need to have in any custom activities to avoid causing problems?

I don’t have the answers yet, but I’ll let you know when I do.