With the availability of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Microsoft is introducing workflow capabilities to the .NET developer platform. These capabilities allow developers to build workflows to meet a wide number of scenarios, from simple sequential workflows to complex state machine-based workflows with sophisticated human interactions.

At the same time, there is a move towards promoting business capabilities to be exposed through encapsulated service endpoints allowing reuse and composition of business functions and processes giving rise to Service-Oriented Architectures. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been made available to help provide developers with capabilities to develop connected systems easily by providing a consistent developer API, a robust hosting runtime, and a flexible configuration-driven solution to aid deployment.