Visual Studio Workflow in SharePoint

Part I

To know about the Basics of Workflow in SharePoint, read this article.

To know about the Creating a Designer Workflow, read this article.

To know about the New Features added in SharePoint Designer 2010, read this article.

In this we will learn about Basics of Visual Studio Workflows in SharePoint.

Windows Workflow Foundation -WWF:

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a Microsoft technology for defining, executing, and managing workflows.

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Workflow_Foundation

Why Visual Studio Workflow is necessary?

From the business perspective, we need some custom workflows to be designed and developed in order to meet the requirements. By using designer, we cannot achieve all the custom actions and hence Visual Studio workflows are necessary.

Moreover, Visual Studio is a known environment to the developers (working with Microsoft Software’s) and hence the design and development is very easy.

Software Requirements

  Ø  Windows Server 2003 R2 Download

  Ø  Microsoft .NET framework 3.0 Download

  Ø  Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Download

  Ø  Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 Download

  Ø  Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK Download

  Ø  Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation Download
   Limitations of using Designer Workflow:

  Ø  A major disadvantage is that, you can create only Sequential Workflows using designer and not the State Machine workflows.

  Ø  We cannot write custom code and custom activities for workflows while creating using designer.

  Ø  Maintenance and upgradeable methods are very less.

To know how to create a sample Sequential Workflow using Visual Studio, read this article Visual Studio Workflow in SharePoint.