Summary

This chapter introduced you to all the Windows Workflow Foundation activities. First, you were introduced to activities and their different types, including composite activities and how they are different from their standard counterparts. The Windows Workflow Foundation Base Activity Library was also covered from A to Z. There are no fewer than 30 activities provided out of the box for workflow development.

Custom activity development was also covered as a way for developers to implement functionality that was not included out of the box with Windows Workflow Foundation. Activity components provide the necessary framework to modify activity functionality and include toolbox items, activity designers, themes, activity validators, serializers, and code generators.

In addition, this chapter introduced activity properties and their surrounding infrastructure. Dependency objects and dependency properties provide the functionality necessary for activity data storage and property projection.

Finally, an activity development example gave some context to the subject matter of this chapter. The example covered the steps necessary to create a custom activity and briefly described the activity’s execution, validation, and look and feel.