It has been in the making for more than a year and today the DevFarm Team announces the GA of their PowerWF Studio product.
For those of you that haven’t played with the Release Candidate, PowerWF Studio combines PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation in a sleek GUI.
It allows you to drag-and-drop any “activity” from the Toolbox onto the IDE’s Workflow canvas. No more looking through endless lines of PowerShell code, your script is available as a nice graphical workflow drawing.
But PowerWF Studio has much more to offer.
One of the nicest features, in my opinion, is the ability to import your PowerShell scripts and they will automatically be converted into a workflow. Have a look at Ben’s Embedded PowerShell video to see an early version of this feature in action.
The “activities” are the building blocks for your workflows.
And the great concept behind this is that PowerWF Studio will automatically create activities from all the PowerShell cmdlets, but also from all the cmdlets in your snapins and your modules. With the Toolbox Manager you can indicate which snapins and modules should be available as activities.
If you get the VMware version of the PowerWF Studio all the PowerCLI cmdlets will be available as activities in the Toolbox. With the help of the embedded PowerShell feature from above, you will be able to import all your vSphere automation scripts.
But it doesn’t stop there. Once you have your workflow, you can deploy this workflow to several environments such as:
- a console application
- a Windows application
- a cmdlet
- a snapin
- a module
- a toolbox activity
- a task (local or remote) that you schedule with the Agent
- a new branch in PowerGui
- a new entry in PowerScripter
- a management pack for SCOM
- an assembly
- a project in Visual Studio
And now all this goodness finally hits the streets !
Go to the DevFarm website, download the installation file and give the product a try. You won’t be disappointed !
I’m planning to publish some real-world examples shortly. Watch this space 😉