Let’s face it, learning a new technology by reading a book is sometimes very hard. Not because the book is badly written but because paper might not be the ideal medium especially when the technology is highly visual. Workflows, as an example, are very visual. You drag and drop shapes onto a design surface. You connect them. You double-click them to add the VB or C# code. Sometimes you just want to watch someone showing you instead of reading how to do it.

Addison-Wesley just introduced LiveLessons, a new computer based training (CBT) series that combine video and book. “Developing Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation” is the first title in this series and the instructor/author is Brian Noyes, a very well known author, trainer and speaker.

The title combines a 62 pages booklet and approximately three hours of video instructions divided in 20 chapters ranging from 6 to 32 minutes in length. It is targeted at developers wanting to learn WF from scratch. The first two chapters introduce you to the concepts behind workflows and WF. The following ones introduce you to the various parts of WF and how to leverage workflows in your applications.

The LiveLessons format is ideal for learning WF and Brian Noyes is the perfect instructor. The pace is excellent and in just three hours, you’ll have a clear understanding of workflows and WF. The video quality is also very good. Basically, you won’t have any trouble reading the code that the instructor is typing. On the audio side, the sound level varies depending on when the instructor is on camera or typing code. It’s not bad but I guess that a little normalization would have helped.

My biggest complaint is not about the content, the instructor, the video and audio quality; it’s about the software itself. The good point is that it doesn’t require any installation at all. That bad point is that there are no skip, forward and backward buttons so you have to sit thru the entire chapter or guess where to click on the sliding bar to move to the next point. Since each chapter is somewhat short, it’s not a show stopper, it’s just annoying.

However, don’t let this you discourage from buying “Developing Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation”, an excellent way to introduce yourself to WF.