WF Activities

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

This article—WF Activities—is from Pro WF, Windows Workflow in .NET 3.0, by Bruce Bukovics. Copyright © 2007 Bruce Bukovics. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission. This article has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.  Read the book review!

WF Activities

The focus of this chapter is the primary building block of all workflows: the activity. This chapter provides a high-level review of the standard activities that are provided with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). You will become acquainted with the available activities, but you will not learn how to use all of them in detail. This is the one chapter that provides an overview of all of the available activities. Many of the individual activities are difficult to understand unless they are discussed as part of a larger subject area. For this reason, the subsequent chapters in this book each focus on a specific subject area and provide additional detail on the activities that are relevant to that subject.

One area that is covered in detail in this chapter is how to add logic to your workflow. There are two primary ways to accomplish this, using the CodeActivity, and developing your own custom activities. Both mechanisms are explored and compared using a common workflow example. This chapter also provides additional information on enhancing the design time experience when using custom activities.