Upgrading to Dublin

Question

For systems running .Net v3.0/v3.5 workflows:

What is the strategy proposed for upgrading to .Net 4.0, and subsequently installing the Dublin extensions and additions, from .Net v3.5 where workflow instances are either running or persisted to the .Net v3.5 peristence store?

How will the process of upgrading to .Net 4.0 impact the running workflow instances?
Will the v3.5 activity instances continue to operate under v4.0? If .Net v4.0 is like v3.0 was to .Net 2.0 where the two essentially co-exist.
Will the persistence store DB schema be backwards compatible with the .Net v3.5 schema? Will data be impacted? or is a new data store required along with the old store?
Will Dublin management recognise .Net v3.5 workflow instances...this would imply .Net v4.0 and v3.5 coexisted somehow.

...maybe there will be a whitepaper on this to a avoid lengthy forum post :-)

Thanks

Greg

Answer 1

Greg,

Thanks for your post.

It turns out that the WF 3.0 and 3.5 runtimes will operate side by side with WF 4.0 on the .Net 4.0 CLR.  Dublin requires .Net 4.0 to be installed, but your existing workflows and their persisted state will remain intact and uneffected.  Any move you consciously decide to make that moves an existing workflow to WF 4.0 would be done by you intentionally and not done automatically by installing Dublin.  This also holds true for existing activities.  They too will continue to run uneffected.  .Net 4.0 is not like .Net 3.0 in the sense that it does contain a new version of the CLR (4.0), however the two will coexist together side by side.  The persistence store for WF 4.0 will exist side by side with your existing persistence store.  There will be some functionality in Dublin that will apply to existing workflows but a fair amount that will not apply.  We will spell this out in great detail in coming releases and documentation.

-Ford McKinstry

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Ford McKinstry