Microsoft® Windows® Workflow Foundation Step by Step

Dehydration and Rehydration

Before we leave the topic of workflow instances, I want to touch on the concept of dehydrating and rehydrating an instance. If you have long-running workflow tasks or have a large number of tasks executing, you can unload tasks and store the necessary execution context information in a SQL Server database using a service that ships with WF. The goal is to unload workflow tasks and store them temporarily only to later reload them when the time is right.

We’ll save a detailed discussion for Chapter 6, but I mention it here because, for one thing, this process targets the workflow instance. But for another, you might hear the terms, and I didn’t want you to have to wade too far into the book without understanding their ...