Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 9 ■ .NET 3.0: WINDOWS WORKFLOW FOUNDATION
Notice that the exposed web method is called doCToF, as this is what you defined on
the interface. Also, when you select doCToF to call up its test page, you’ll see that you can
enter the value for nC (see Figure 9-20).
Figure 9-20. Entering the nC value
Clicking Invoke will now call the workflow and convert the input value from centigrade
to Fahrenheit, returning the answer in an XML-encoded double.
This example shows how straightforward it is to use WF to create a workflow and
expose it as a web service. It’s worth playing and experimenting with, as, particularly for
large complex transactions, you can drastically reduce the amount of code that you have
to write and encapsulate business processes in easy-to-manage redistributable libraries
that can be published as web services or hosted within web applications.
Summary
WF is a powerful and flexible design and runtime environment that allows you to encapsulate
your business processes into a visual design and then compile and implement that
design into a working program. This can come in particularly handy for web development,
where you can neatly bundle up some very sophisticated functionality behind
redistributable libraries or hosted, sharable web services. As you design your web appli-