This chapter covers the core concepts of workflow development, including the workflow infrastructure, compilation, serialization, and development modes. It also discusses the Visual Studio development environment. As a key component of the workflow development process, Visual Studio provides a rich set of tools for developing and debugging workflow-based applications.
Most developers use Visual Studio to create and modify workflow applications, but it is by no means required for workflow development. Just as with C# and the .NET SDK, all you need to develop managed software is notepad.exe and csc.exe (the command-line C# compiler). Granted, most people don’t use Notepad to develop workflows, but you can use it to break down the components of the workflow infrastructure that are abstracted by Visual Studio.