Persistent workflow with durable delay activity hosted in ASP.NET

Question

The situation: a workflow hosted in ASP.NET application using WorkflowServiceHost and contains durable delay. The workflow is currently inside the delay activity and was persisted into database.

Then the application pool, under which the ASP.NET application is running, goes to be recycled (e.g. by web.config change) and there are no more http requests to the ASP.NET application. And now is the time when delay activity should finish and next activity in the workflow should be executed.

Does it mean the next activity will not be executed until any request to the ASP.NET application because the app pool was recycled?

Answer 1

The WorkflowServiceHost is responsible for loading workflows with an expired delay activity. So you have to make sure the WorkflowServiceHost is actually loaded into memory.

Using the AppFabric makes this a lot easier, configure the service to autostart and AppFabricWorkflowManagementService will make sure it is restarted.