Difference between AppFabric workflow service and workflow manager

Question 1

This is a tough one.

AppFabric Workflow Services (actually WCF workflow services) are hosted in WorkflowServiceHost, but to be honest, we can see that AppFabric workflow hosting is not really evolving much. Especially in combination with BizTalk tools (adapter & mapper) through BizTalk AppFabric connect, it is nice to build some things.

Workflow Manager is the technology that was shipped with SharePoint Server 2013, together with Service Bus for Windows Server. To be honest, it is a V1, but this will probably be the technology that will be evolved (especially since SharePoint is the biggest customer of this technology ;))

The nice thing about Workflow Manager is that it is built to be cloud-ready (isolation, scalability, security...). You also have the concept of the Trusted Surface (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj193509(v=azure.10).aspx) This allows you to sandbox customization.

So, my bet would be: if your product/platform is a long term thing, go for Workflow Manager, but live with the V1 concepts, or ignore the Trusted Surface sandboxing. If you build it for shorter term, go for AppFabric still.

Hope this helps

Question 2

Jurgen Willis (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/workflowteam/archive/2012/10/24/announcing-the-release-of-workflow-manager-1-0.aspx) when announcing Workflow Manager 1.0 answered this question.

A major difference between them is that the AppFabric (for Workflows) is supposed to be for hosting Workflow Services based on WorkflowServiceHost(WFSH). Meaning that the workflows in AppFabric are all services and expect to be invoked as services consuming and exposing WCF Soap Services.

But the Workflow Manager can host any type of Workflow including services. You can have workflows initiated that does not receive or send any messages, but only does DB transactions.

Question 3

Some follow up I found.

App Fabric is going to be discontinued according to this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabric/archive/2015/04/02/windows-server-appfabric-1-1-ends-support-4-2-2016.aspx

And Sharepoint Server 2016 relies on App Fabric: https://redmondmag.com/articles/2015/05/12/sharepoint-2016-and-infopath.aspx

Workflow Manager 1.0 was shipped with Sharepoint Server 2013 as mentioned previously in this thread. Does that mean that Workflow Manager is also discontinued or will it come as a version 2.0 when Sharepoint Server 2016 is released? Any other information about where all this is going is very welcome.

The question:

will "Workflow manager" replace "appfabric workflow"? for new project what to select?

still seems unanswered to me.

Windows Workflow Foundation is such a great and potent framework, and it is troublesome if you don't have an on premise host system like AppFabric you can rely on.

Question 4

Sam Vanhoutte is right:

Cons of workflow manager is that it really is a a V1 product, the two main issues that I ran into when using it were:

Workflows hosted in Workflow Manager are expected to be declarative: adding your own custom code can be tricky, documentation is not extensive.
Workflow manager does not allow you to force persistence of a workflow state easily. There is some mention that delay activities will persist state, however, the Persist Activity is explicitly not supported. I have run into cases while building workflows where the same activity is executed multiple times because of a problem in the hosting environment configuration or because an exception in a custom code activity crashes the host instead of suspending the workflow as it does when using AppFabric.

If you have the time to put in to learn the platform and deal with V1 issues I would definitely choose workflow manager, if you have experience with hosting in AppFabric be prepared for significant differences.

Question 5

Windows fabric or service fabric are the ones which are used to form service bus cluster ring. Service fabric is used in sb1.1 with tls1.2 support version. The previous versions use windows fabric.

App fabric is not used by workflow manager. It is used by sharepoint.