Thursday 10 January 2008

Resources from my workflow deep-dive presentation

Had a lot of fun presenting VS workflows at the UK SharePoint user group last night. We seemed to have weather issues (again) which might have put some people off travelling, but we still had a great crowd of around 100-120 people. As promised, here are my resources (my 'workflow bonanza pack' in fact ;-)). In the zip behind the link below, you will find:

  • Slide deck (presentation title: "Workflow: A deep dive into developing workflows for SharePoint using Visual Studio and Infopath")
  • Sample code for the state machine expenses workflow I built
  • My workflow information pack document

Much of the goodness is in the document - the contents are:

  • Links to my favourite workflow resources (blogs, books etc.)
  • How to: work with SharePoint tasks and e-mails in workflows
  • How to: Pass data into an InfoPath task edit form
  • How to: retrieve what the user entered into an InfoPath task edit form
  • How to: debug a workflow
  • How to: use serialization to retrieve data from an InfoPath form
  • Advanced workflow tips
  • Workflow pitfalls
  • Appendix 1 - correlation tokens

You can download all this from http://sharepointchris.googlepages.com/COB_WorkflowResources.zip

P.S. I'll be expanding on this content - the next couple of articles will be workflow-focused.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chris

Thanks for an excellent and informative presentation at the User Group last night. It was a great introduction to workflow and some of the pitfalls to look out for. Thanks also for the starter pack, I'll certainly use it to try and work through an example.

cheers

Roger

Willem du Preez said...

Hello mate

A colleague of mine found this article on reusing and debugging SharePoint Designer workflows: http://sergeluca.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!E8A06D5F2F585013!1256.entry

Thought it might be on interest!

Will du Preez

Chris O'Brien said...

Looks useful, cheers Will.

Along similar lines is the Porting SharePoint Designer workflows to Visual Studio article on the SharePoint team blog.

Cheers,

Chris.

Anonymous said...

I am now in charge of a very intensive workflow and am trying to use your zip file to figure it out:), but after unzipping it - it A: would not open in VS 2005 and B: when I tried opening in VS 2008, it wants to convert it and it asks for a password for the "COB.Demos.Keypair.pfx" Key file.

Help:)

Thia

Chris O'Brien said...

Hi Thia,

I think this is because you don't have the VS2005 workflow extensions installed. Try again once you have this. I also found this thread which has some more information on this:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=452668&SiteID=1.

HTH,

Chris.

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris,

Thank you for an good tool, SPD workflow it is not work with the associated list.

Scenario: I have a list with the auto workflow (SPD workflow) I export the list and workflow as well but once import I couldn't able to see the workflow in the list.

Help!

Thanks

Chris O'Brien said...

Hi Ria,

I'm a bit confused about which tool you mean, but I'm guessing you've found my Content Deployment Wizard elsewhere on this blog and are using that. Unfortunately you won't be able to move associated workflows with lists using the Wizard, since Microsoft's Content Migration API (which the Wizard uses) doesn't support this.

I mention this on the Codeplex site:

- the following content does not get captured by the Content Migration API - alerts, audit trail, change log history, recycle-bin items, workflow tasks/state

HTH,

Chris.