Part IV: Miscellaneous Topics

In this section I'll explain how to use several interesting features provided for Office workflows. In Chapter 14 you'll use a ConditionedActivityGroup to send reminder emails at regular intervals until an assigned task has been completed. In Chapter 15 you'll create a simple workflow using the SharePoint Designer and then import this workflow into Visual Studio. This allows you to start a workflow using a no-code approach and then transition to Visual Studio to add more complex capabilities. This will also give you a view into how no-code workflows are implemented "under-the-covers."

In Chapter 16 I'll show you how to build custom actions in Visual Studio and deploy them to the SharePoint server. These actions can then be used by the SharePoint Designer and included in no-code workflows. Finally, you'll implement a Pluggable Workflow Service in Chapter 17 that allows you to call external systems using asynchronous processing. This was not possible in prior releases and is one of the nice improvements in Office 2010.