Following Morgan Skinner's introduction to Workflow Foundation, Tom Fischer delves more deeply under the hood of WF, explaining some of the issues you'll need to think about when using WF with ASP.NET 2.0, in particular focusing on using the WorkflowInstance and WorkflowRuntime objects in an ASP.NET environment. Tom also touches on service configuration, the design of activities and architectural issues for an enterprise workflow.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) provides an elegant method of adding extensibility to applications, whether those applications are rich client or web based. It consists of a runtime engine that executes workflows, a set of building blocks known as activities that are used to compose a workflow, and a set of services which are used at runtime which are used to support the workflow as it executes.

Workflows are perfect for exposing business logic as graphical flow-chart like models, and for providing hooks where custom code can be executed. This article will provide an introduction to how you can use Windows Workflow within your own applications, and show how common business scenarios can be accomplished.