I had the opportunity to present a session “WCF and WF in Financial Services: Notes from the Field” yesterday to a great crowd at the Financial Services Dev Con in New York.

For those who have seen my sessions on MSDN, those have focused on getting people up to speed on the two technologies. This session presented very brief overviews of the technologies (3 slides for each) and then delved into real-world scenarios where people were using them, complete with demos.

This session focused primarily on scenarios where Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation could provide the ability to enhance what was already in place, enable new scenarios around connectivity and workflow, and overall take advantage of the features of WCF and WF regardless of where they're at today.

I've uploaded the deck and the presentations here http://www.marcmercuri.com/Downloads/FinServDevCon.zip, and the good news is that other than the one COM interop demo for Lotus, every demo here can be run on your own machine. In cases where there's a use of Domino server - you get to take advantage of the domino services set up on the public web by my colleague, Gary Devendorf.  For the Java examples, I used the basic samples that came with Java Enterprise Studio 8 which is now a free download.  A note for VS developers - the Java environment may look similiar to VS, but it's different. To make it easy to run, the only thing you need to do is install, load the sun blueprint sample, and change the URL to point to the WCF service.

The demos posted include:

• Taking an existing, unsecure web service (in this case using Lotus Notes Domino as a source), placing a WCF front end on it, and exposing a WS-* service beyond the firewall.  The benefit here is obviously security, and the ability to extend what you may have in place already to accomodate external customers.
• Taking a Windows Workflow Foundation, exposing it as a web service, and consuming it via an existing java application.
• An example of using a UI driven by workflow
• Using the workflow engine provided as part of workflow foundation inside of Excel.
• Using WF to coordinate multiple services. This includes a standard ASMX service, as well as Domino web service located remotely.
• An example of the flexibility provided by data contracts. The demo consisted of a service and client based on version one of a data contract, and the data contract is then modified to support a new data element (a URL for an RSS Feed). Even though the data contract has changed, the client continues to work.