Introduction to LEADTOOLS Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Windows Workflow foundation is a .NET 3.0 technology which allows developers and IT administrators to create workflow applications for Windows Vista, XP, and 2003 server. A workflow application is a software application which coordinates and manages individual units of work, encapsulated as activities. Activities can be chained together to automate one or more processes. These processes are usually business-related, but can be any process that requires a series of steps that can be automated via software including document archival, order processing, inventory control, and more.

Windows Workflow Foundation supports the high demands of today's automated systems by offering a robust workflow engine. The framework allows for multiple engines within a single application as well as multiple workflows within a single engine. Since the engine itself requires some type of host, they can be executed from several types of applications including command line, win-form, windows and web service, and ASP.NET web sites. Applications can be created solely using the workflow graphical user design interface, code behind files (C#, VB.NET), or a combination of both.

The LEADTOOLS Windows Workflow offering includes WF activities for file loading and saving, TWAIN and WIA scanning, image processing, document image processing and clean-up, reading and writing barcodes, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). These new activities can be used in any application framework that supports Windows WF such as SharePoint and Microsoft CRM.

For feature articles, downloads, and community support, visit the MSDN forum.

Key Features:

WorkflowImage Class. LEADTOOLS provides the WorkflowImage Class, usable from most workflow LEADTOOLS activities which accept or output an image. Since the WorkflowImage Class also exposes a standard LEADTOOLS RasterImage class, your workflow-based applications can now leverage the power of all LEADTOOLS image processing and file input / output functionality.
File Format Support. Read, write, convert, and save image files in over 150 of the most popular standard image formats, including JPEG, JPEG 2000 [read], GIF, TIFF (including G3/G4, LZW [save], CMYK, JTIF), PNG, BMP, MODCA/IOCA, PCX, TGA, and XPS.
Image Compression. Contains classes for loading/saving image and non-image data to the multiple image file formats supported by LEADTOOLS. Support includes multi-page files, compressed files, view perspectives, raw image data, and more.
Image Processing. Use more than 30 digital filters and transforms to process and clean up images. Support includes smooth, sharpen, edge detect/enhance, resize, rotate, crop, trim, and rotate images using various resampling techniques. Over half of all image functions support both signed and unsigned images.
Barcode Read/Write. Complete support for reading and writing most 1D and 2D barcode types including QR Code , PDF417 , MicroPDF417, DataMatrix, UPC A, Code 3 of 9, Code 128, EAN 13, and many more.
Scanning. Add support for automatically acquiring images from any TWAIN compliant scanner. The Scan activity also allows for complete control over many scanner settings including bit depth, page orientation, page size, resolution, brightness, contrast, and many more.
OCR. Perform optical character on images and output to over 20 document formats including text, PDF, WORD, HTML, and more.