Workflow foundation workflow types

Question

Hi,

In WF workflows, what is the difference (conceptually) between a state machine and sequential workflow?

Thanks

Answer 1

A sequential workflow is a workflow that follows a fixed predefined path. There can be loops and conditional branches in there but knowing where you are you can always predict what is going to happen next. Very comparable with a regular C#/VB program. Very suitable for machine lever workflows.

A state machine is much less predictable. Basically it always wants to be in a given state and will stay there until some, usually external, event occurs that might result in a state change. These are much more like the event driven nature of a UI application and typically used to model human interaction workflows. See Wikipedia for a more complete description of state machines in general.