So much for the *open bid* process, eh? That second candidate could probably talk ‘Inside Baseball’ with the farmers, and was thus awarded the contract.

I think it’s useful to place your story in a larger context. Specifically, how will the federal government award contracts for its electronic health records initiative (which is part of the President’s latest stimulus package)? Will the contracts be awarded to candidates or companies that can talk ‘Inside Baseball’ with the pols? Or will the contracts be awarded to those most uniquely suited for the task? With your story and others in mind, I assume that the government will trend towards the former. Alas… C’est la vie.

I absolutly see your point. The biggest stumbling block for alot of the new MS technology is the learning curve. The most flexible way to implement work flow is by just writing your own C# assembly. This also means that you may need to create your own tools to authoring rules.

Its a great learning technology for geeks that love to play with new things, but the pragmatic programmer in me tells me that its not a good idea to use an unproven, new technology in a real work application.

WF demos great. And initially, I was very excited. (http://elegantcode.com/2008/04/04/on-windows-workflow-and-biztalk/#comment-19242)

But let me ask you two questions:

1. If you were developing a complicated logistics engine for FedEx or UPS, would you use Windows Workflow?
2. Assuming that you would use WF, and assuming that you deployed that engine to production with -zero- defects, would you feel comfortable adding enhancements and maintaining the system over the next few years?

Perhaps an even better question is this:
- Would you feel comfortable acting as a team lead, supervising four developers who were developing with WF?

As you can tell, I’ve already pondered answers to these questions.

My take is this: WF gives you too little return for too much investment (i.e. learning curve, awkward IDE, etc.) Most specifically, WF’s XML markup obscures check-ins and prevents a team from conducting sensible code reviews.

As for that hypothetical logistics engine, I’d much prefer a Console App with LINQ.

Here’s the DNR podcast that goes with it: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=379

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/jQueryToShipWithASPNETMVCAndVisualStudio.aspx

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001163.html

Yes – I am a big fan of jQuery.

I think that all UI developers should learn it and love it.

In short: ‘Stop using the getElementbyId DOM method!!!’

I am trying to display a WPF Usercontrol in the result pane, rather than a WinForms UserControl.

At compile time, i get an error that I cannot convert from System.Windows.Forms.Control to my System.Windows.Controls

Any idea on how to get past this?