I don't understand what Windows Workflow gives me

Take this for a simple workflow. An employee creates a document, from here the document goes to level one supervisor for approval, if approved it goes to next level and so on until final approval and file repository. If not each leve开发者_如何学JAVAl can kick back to previous level.

What does Windows Workflow Foundation give me that I can do on my own? Those sound like simple rules to code so I'm not sure what I am gaining with WWF.

Thank you.

EDIT: Now if that flow chart that I make in Visual Studio actually created a wizard or something that I could use that'd be different. I don't know that would even be coding but at least I could understand it better.

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Having never used WF myself, allow me to direct you to those who have:

• Paul Andrew, SharePoint Dev PM, on What to use WWF For
• Why Workflow? from James Conard's former MSDN blog
• "Italian Railway Police Automates its Document Management and Workflow", from MS Case Studies

Here's a quote from that last article:

WF controls the approval flow, creates Web pages on demand to secure human approval for an action, and controls SharePoint actions through a Web service.

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I would say that Workflow presents more benefit to the organization than the developer. As developers, it does us no good to define things we can do on our own in some extraneous framework. But what if you aren't the developer, and you needed an email shot to the top level supervisor, in your example, when nobdy approves the document after so many days. If you designed an application that allowed the reordering of events, someone besides yourself could designate this flow. Granted, you would have to code things pretty generically, but it is worthwhile if your scenario requires outside people to dictate flow and who are not developers.

For example, in Microsoft CRM, certain workflows contain steps to be followed. You could write your own workflow that uses the surrounding framework to create new workflows. You have no need to worry about adding your code in some hackeyed way to the system. The system knows workflows, it knows how to follow the steps, and it can execute them. There is benefit to WF, but it is limited.