Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

The Components of a Workflow

Before you begin developing workflows, it’s important that you understand the components that work together to help you build and run them. The basic parts involved with creating, hosting, and running a workflow include the workflow itself, a host process, the workflow runtime, the workflow runtime services, and a client application that communicates with the workflow. We describe these components at a high level in this section, and you can get to know more about each component in coming sections.

• A Workflow—A workflow is simply a collection of activity objects that work together to describe a process. The steps of a workflow are expressed as a hierarchy of activities. The top most, or outer, activity defines the ...