Creating Custom Activities can make you rich

After pulling out my hair to understand what it takes to make an activity without code-behind appear in the toolbar of Visual Studio 2008, I resigned myself to inevitability: ○ Unless you want to write your own XOML then you better use the code-behind format if you want to create a workflow. ○ Creating a custom activity is easy. Creating a custom activity that will have behavior and attributes like built in activities will take a little more time. ○ Most things you want to do in workflow can be accomplished using the default activities so don’t create your own custom activities if you don’t have to. ○ There is no such thing as truly dynamic properties in workflow. You will have to use any of the patterns for state (like State for example). I’ve finally been able to coble together a workable solution for a client that needed dynamic logic and dynamic variables. They also wanted to create the workflows graphically. The solution we proposed was to use custom activities that are arranged into a workflow using Visual Studio 2008. The clients would drop our custom activities onto a Sequential Workflow with code behind. They would then use the Rules Editor to define conditions that were a requirement of the Decision type activities. The client would then automatically create a XOML and a .rules file directly from inside Visual Studio 2008. The XOMl, .rules, and our activity library dll would be all that is required for another developer to create our workflow inside any Workflow container. This is powerful stuff because that is allowing custom logic and rules to be embedded into any system with