Microsoft® Windows® Workflow Foundation Step by Step

Creating External Data Services

Now we come to a more difficult section, that being our task to create the bridging code for the external data service. The host must have some code it can use to access the data that the workflow instance is trying to communicate. We will use a tool to build activities for the workflow to use (that’s in the next section), but no tool exists for the host side of the communications connection.

Here, we’ll build a slightly simplified version of a full connection-bridging architecture. This version supports only workflow-to-host communication. (We’ll build a general-purpose bidirectional bridge you can reuse when we get to Chapter 17.) The connection bridge we’ll build is divided into two parts: the connector, which ...