Chapter 8. Custom Visual Studio workflows
This chapter covers
- Introducing Visual Studio workflows
- Creating a sequential workflow
- Creating a state machine workflow
- Importing a SharePoint Designer workflow into Visual Studio
Using Visual Studio to build your custom SharePoint workflows enables you to build complex workflows. The possibilities are limitless. With Visual Studio, you write your workflows from scratch, even though you use the Windows Workflow Foundation architecture.
Visual Studio isn’t a new tool for SharePoint 2010. In fact, it was first released in 1997 under the name of Visual Studio 97, well before SharePoint even existed. This was Microsoft’s first attempt at having one development environment for many languages (C++, J++, and InterDev). With the arrival of SharePoint 2003, Visual Studio 2003 had SharePoint extensions, which enabled SharePoint developers to package up their development customizations and deploy them into SharePoint more easily. Even with these extensions, you needed substantial under-the-hood knowledge, which made their value negligible.