Workflow Foundation: using workflow tasks without SharePoint?

Question

I've previously done WF workflows hosted by SharePoint sites. We currently have to develop a pretty complex workflow for a vanilla ASP.NET application that, alas, does not run in a SharePoint context.

I've noticed that when I create a 'plain' WF workflow in VS2008, I don't have the CreateTask, onTaskChanged etc activities. I suppose this is because all the task API is provided by the extra MOSS layer.

My question is, is there any library that implements task-oriented stuff for WF or do we have to roll our own?

Answer 1

WF (without SharePoint) doesn't provide such functionality out of the box. I'm not aware of any library that provides task/inbox functionality, so we have built our own.

The tasks are created by a custom activity. The workflows will be signaled using plain WF 3.5 receive activities which cause the workflows to wait for a signal from any WF external GUI.

There is a sample from Microsoft that shows something similar, though it's not using WF services.