Chapter 17. Pluggable Workflow Services

When building workflow solutions, you may need to make a call into an external system to retrieve data or perform some processing. Often, that call can take some time to complete, and it is undesirable to tie up resources on the SharePoint server while waiting for the activity to finish. The Workflow Foundation (WF) provides the ability to make a call and then enter an idle state while waiting for a response. During the idle state, the workflow data is persisted, and the instance is unloaded from memory.

In SharePoint 2007, however, this feature was not available to SharePoint workflows because of limitations in the SharePoint-hosted runtime implementation. The SharePoint 2010 release has fixed this, and ...

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