Designer tools in the works

eWeek: “In an interview at the VSLive conference here, S. “Soma” Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of developer tools, said the company is following up its Expression suite of designer tools with new designer tools for both its future Web services platform—WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), also known as Indigo—and the upcoming WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation).”

I think that most people thought that Microsoft would be working on these sorts of tools, but the timing of this discussion is interesting. It makes me wonder if we’ll have a more aggressive stance on shipping an out of the box workflow designer in the near future- having no inside knowledge, I thought it was going to be a while before we saw one. I do hope that we have an “end user” story for workflow. Almost everyone I talk to would like to see such a tool in Office or SharePoint. I know that Soma is focused on dev tools, but maybe some of the learning there can be extended to the teams supporting end users.