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Pageflow questions: "What about WCSF / Acropolis / Codename 'foo'"?

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So, I got a little bit of feedback from my initial post.  First, thanks, it's great to see all of the interest in the technology.  I want to use this as the place to answer common questions that arise about the sample. 

Here's one that I got internally as well as externally(here, here )

What about WCSF and Acropolis?  Does this change how we think about the problem today? 

The short answers are "they are still here", "no".

WCSF 

There are a lot of people who are using the Web Client Software Factory.  It is definitely something you should check out, it is a great toolkit to build composite web applications.  Part of what it does, among many other things, is the Pageflow Application Block designed to model navigation.   This is what most people are wondering about when they first hear about the pageflow sample we released.  Don't they do the same thing?  From a functional level, yes, they both provide a nice abstraction to model flow through an application.  This is a sample usage of WF to solve a similar problem in a little bit of a different way.  The model inside the WCSF is extensible, allowing a different provider of pageflow information, so it is probably even possible to put this pageflow sample inside of the WCSF, I have yet to give that a try.

At a deeper level, there are some differences that stem from the implementation of the Pageflow Application Block as a state machine, which I will get into in my next post.

Acropolis

Acropolis, announced at TechEd last week, is still early on in its lifecycle, as part of the ".NET Client Futures".  I haven't spent a lot of time looking at it yet, but it is something else which will have a way to model the flow within an application, in this case between WPF forms. 

Conclusion

From a support perspective, it's important to note that this sample is unsupported (save for myself and a few others) as opposed to Acropolis and WCSF which have teams working on them.

It is important to note that both WCSF and Acropolis aim to solve a much larger problem than simple UI navigation.  In that sense, in no way does the pageflow sample released represent a wholesale replacement of either of them.  The sample that we released aims to illustrate a way to use WF to solve the problem of UI navigation.  The important thing to take away from this is that it can be incredibly valuable to model the flow through one's application using a technology which allows separation from the UI. This makes our UI more loosely coupled with the rest of our application, and increases the agility to react to changes in process / data required / need to track infomation.  

Also, even if you don't want to use this for pageflow, tune in, because there are some pretty valuable things that any WF developer can learn by taking a look at this sample.  I will continue to discuss those as well.

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