Bah.

I got all jazzed up tonight to play with something new.  But alas, no bits of Sparkle to play with, so I decided to go with the next best thing, the Windows Workflow Foundation (WinWF).

Download, install…nothing.  Fuck.  Looks like right now it’s only working on 2005 beta 2, and not on the RC.  For me, it says it’s installed (in Add/Remove Programs) but I don’t have the project types that I’m supposed to have.  For others, it appears to throw a Package Load error (Microsoft.Workflow.VSDesigner.DesignerPackage) on VS 2005 startup.

Not finding anything on any blogs, or the forums, and it’s too soon for Google to have a clue, so I guess I’ll wait and see what happens.  I really want to play with this though, I have a feeling it could save me a *lot* of work writing my own.  I’ll keep you posted (and you do the same) on the WinWF with RC issue.

In the meantime, check out This Developer Walkthrough by Dino, and WindowsWorkflow.net.  Also the WinWF MSDN Forum.  I have a feeling that of all the new tech coming out of PDC, this is going to be the first one I go deep with.

On the 2005/2.0 upgrade…I calculate that I have shed *at least* 3 weeks of development time from my current project just by virtue of switching.  That doesn’t include productivity gains from the IDE and things I don’t know about yet.  I plan to blog the transition in all it’s glory for those of you who will go there next.  I will be your everyday corporate development champion for the new stuff.  Or…you know…I’ll just be typing and you’ll be like “um…yeah…you suck”.  Either way.