WF runtime ported to work on .NET 6 by Uipath

[yashshah]

Continuing the discussion from Highlights of version 1.5:
Can we use WF which is available by Uipath this support up to .net 6.0 ??this way we openrpa support packages up to .net 6.0

: here is the github link GitHub - UiPath/CoreWF: WF runtime ported to work on .NET 6

[Allan_Zimmermann]

“No,” as pointed out in the original post. Microsoft gave them Workflow Foundation, and they decided to open source everything except the UI (the designer).
And 50-75% of the reason to use WF is the designer.
I’m sure someone could make their own (Microsoft did, and UiPath did), but as you know, I’m not really a UI guy, so that is not a task for me (when doing that, it would make sense to just let go of Windows and go pure web, like elsa did). So, I lean more toward going cross-platform, and then using better and more modern frameworks.

When looking at the usage data of OpenRPA, I see people rarely use the recorder, so this splits people into two groups: those that like workflows and visualization of the process, and people who like scripting/code. My long-term plan is to keep OpenRPA alive as long as Microsoft will allow me to, but help people migrate to agents as much as I can. Both to save costs, to get more stable code, and to allow “customers” the ability to draw from a bigger pool of people when searching for employees/consulting firms. The long-term plan is to create a recorder experience again that generates code that can run in agents (whether that be in Node.js/Python or C# has yet to be decided, maybe a combination; it’s still very much only in the thought process). I really like the idea of using (or building something similar to) automa but with the added option to also talk to C# code using NM so you can record anywhere, not just in the browser. This will also allow creating cool integrations in the browser (like reacting to events in the browser, adding custom web elements, etc., controlling other agents from the browser, or controlling the browser from other agents). But for now, if you prefer visual programming, we have OpenRPA (for anything .NET 4 and legacy things like mainframe, Java, Windows, etc.) and Node-RED for event-driven API integrations.

PS: If your idea was to use UiPath’s WF for running the workflows (.NET 6) but keep OpenRPA for designing them (.NET 4) and then compile the YAML on the runtime that wants to run it, yeah, that could work, but it would mean all activities have to be implemented twice: once for .NET 4.x and once for .NET 6.0. That is going to be hard, at least in the beginning, and will not be future-proof, so unless someone makes an OSS version of the designer, I prefer looking for an alternative solution. Then you could create a completely new UI, preferably in the browser (like elsa did), but once you’ve designed the UI, you’ve pretty much also created the workflow engine, and then you might as well stick with that (for instance, I get the feeling you can import all WF workflows into elsa, as long as someone created the same activities for elsa).