Developing ASP.NET Workflow Applications

Article
03/05/2010

This section discusses topics related to developing ASP.NET workflow applications. For example, Windows Workflow Foundation supports Web service interoperability as part of the Windows Workflow Foundation framework. Web service interoperability consists of the ability to expose a workflow as a Web service to ASP.NET clients and to other workflows, and also to invoke a Web service from a workflow.

Windows Workflow Foundation supports publishing a workflow as an ASP.NET Web service on a Web server or server farm running ASP.NET on Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0. Because Windows Workflow Foundation Web service support is based on ASP.NET 2.0, it inherits most of the features of a standard ASP.NET Web service.

Windows Workflow Foundation Web services communication support falls into the following two categories:

Invoking a Web service by using an activity. This is conceptually the same as adding a Web reference to the workflow project and calling methods on the generated proxy class. For more information, see Invoking Web Services from a Workflow.
Publishing a workflow as a Web service. For more information, see Deploying a Workflow as a Web Service.