Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Windows Workflow Fundamentals

You should think of a workflow as a series of activities that are interrelated to solve a specific business problem. These activities might call external code or services to accomplish their tasks. They typically also involve human intervention such as approval or some related form of processing. When an activity is complete, the next activity in the workflow gets executed until the specific workflow instance has completed. The workflow might have to pause during execution while waiting for a message or a user response. The workflow might be short-lived or long-running, spanning days or even months. In this way, a workflow mimics the needs of the actual business process.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides ...