WSS caches old Workflow version

Question

Hi,

I'm currently developing three workflows that are supposed to handle the status of items in different lists. Each Workflow is attached to a separate list. When I'm deploying and debugging in my development Environment, everything works fine. Except for the case, when an item is created via an incoming mail. I already figured out, that I have to restart some services and then it'll work, but I'm still not sure wich of the services is caching the workflow.

Afterwards I build a .wsp file which I deploy on a server. Each time I deploy the solution, I do a retract and delete solution first.

After deployment I'll recreate the workflows on the lists

It seems to me that this has no effect. An older version of the workflow is still triggered, if I create a new instance in the list.

I already restarted the whole server and still no result.

Has anyone an idea what else I could try in order to get this working?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If Timer Service is the one that calls your code, then restart Windows SharePoint Services Timer (OWSTIMER.EXE).

When workflow waits on something, it gets serialized (hydrated). When event happens, OWSTIMER.EXE deserializes (dehydrates) and continues workflow execution.

So timer is the one that wakes workflow up.

Answer 2

So this problem kind of resolved itself.

I was reading an article on Kirk Evanns Blog on an issue with the development of workflows in VS2008 for WSS. I had not realized that I still had an illeagle reference in my Project properties. I removed the reference. The second thing I tried was deploying with -upgradesolution rather than doing a retract-delete-add-deploy...

I don't know which of both did the trick, but I can finally see the new workflows kicking in.

Thanks for your help.