Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a Microsoft technology for defining, executing, and managing workflows. This technology was first released in November 2006 as a part of .NET Framework 3.0.
Workflows, like traditional programs, allow you to coordinate work but have some important differences.
- Workflows can handle long running work by persisting to a durable store, such as a database, when idle and loading again once there is work to do
- An instance of a workflow can be modified dynamically while running in the event that new conditions require the workflow to behave differently from the way it did when it was created
- Workflows are a declarative way of writing programs by linking together pre-defined activities rather than an imperative programming model of writing lines of code
- Workflows allow you to declare business rules that are separated from your code making it easier for you to modify them in the future
- Workflows support different styles of systems with sequential and state machine workflows