Workflow Foundation: using workflow tasks without SharePoint?

Question

I've previously done WF workflows hosted by SharePoint sites. We currently have to develop a pretty complex workflow for a vanilla ASP.NET application that, alas, does not run in a SharePoint context.

I've noticed that when I create a 'plain' WF workflow in VS2008, I don't have the CreateTask, onTaskChanged etc activities. I suppose this is because all the task API is provided by the extra MOSS layer.

My question is, is there any library that implements task-oriented stuff for WF or do we have to roll our own?

Answer 1

WF (without SharePoint) doesn't provide such functionality out of the box. I'm not aware of any library that provides task/inbox functionality, so we have built our own.

The tasks are created by a custom activity. The workflows will be signaled using plain WF 3.5 receive activities which cause the workflows to wait for a signal from any WF external GUI.

There is a sample from Microsoft that shows something similar, though it's not using WF services.

Answer 2

I have only created one workflow in .Net, but that one uses a webservice entry point, e.g. MyService.xamlx is the URL invoked in a SOAP request, using the Receive activity name as operation name and passing the parameters defined in the ReceiveParametersContent element.

(I did notice that the VS 2010 service invoker got confused and would not let me specify the parameters, but SoapUI was perfectly willing to work with the WSDL returned from MyService.xamlx?wsdl .)

The project template was "WCF Workflow Service Application"