I'm back from US (we went to San Diego and Las Vegas before leaving US) and when I got home, my company had an internal conference for a couple of days. Meanwhile Santi posted an interesting question on my previous post: "What do you think about CAB and WWF working together?". I started as usual to answer it as a short comment, but, also as usual, it got a little bit long, so I thought that it deserved a post of itself.
I think that both technologies are very interesting, and when combining two interesting technologies that support different parts of an application it's even more interesting.
Unfortunately I haven't had the time to dig deeper into CAB yet, but I really believe that it has its strengths. I have been building three incarnations of something similar to CAB, but more like MMC for Business Applications, which also contains some higher level (but still pluggable) services. Examples of such services are report preview, print, export, authentication and authorization, some support for online/offline. I’m very eager to get the time to see if my think around this kind of solutions is doable with CAB, which I think it will be after speaking with Peter Provost (from the CAB team) at the PDC conference. In that case I will probably start my fourth incarnation.
I have not had the time to look more into WWF either and therefore I do not have any clear picture of how I think I will use it and in which scenarios. Since I’m very into building SO systems I can say that in a process services I will probably use WWF more often than not, if not using Biztalk. WWF will probably also be useful in other type of services (Activity, Entity and Infrastructure) and might also be interesting in the client, but it know to little and I haven’t been thinking about it enough to say how and for sure.
I feel that I have quit a trip before I’m able to have any useful opinion about you question, but still I think it’s very interesting.