Robin Clowers: SharePoint Workflow Notes

Here are some notes from my experience building a SharePoint state machine workflow.

All fields delcared on the workflow object must be serializable type or marked nonSerializedAny activities before the workflow activated event will not have access to workflow properties
Remember to remove dll's from the GAC when building, GAC'ed versions will supersede local versions
Emailing from SharePoint requires the network service account to have local activation permission for "IIS WAMREG Admin Service" (a dcom service): http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/10/25/dcom-fun-with-sharepoint/
There is a bug in the delay activity, here are some patches: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/07/15/announcing-availability-of-infrastructure-updates.aspx, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953630/
SetSate is not like a return, the rest of the activities in that phase will still execute
You cannot have more than one list template in a feature
Set workflow logging level use this command:
- stsadm -o setlogginglevel -category "Workflow Infrastructure" -tracelevel verbose
To get and set timer settings use this command:
- stsadm -o getproperty -pn job-workflow -url http://localhost/
- stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-workflow -pv "Every 1 minutes between 0 and 59" -url http://localhost/
To allow unsigned powershell scripts to run use this command:

There is no concept of versioning for Visual Studio created SharePoint workflows
Instead, include the version in the feature path, name, description and workflow name and description
Change the assembly version, and the version in each of the other places
Deploy as a new feature
Make sure the old workflow is marked "No new instances" after you associate the new version (this should be automatic)
Based on this, it seems like workflows should be in their own features to allow for simpler versioning
Delay activities were not working correctly
Worked with MS Premier support for weeks to try and resolve this
Resetting the SharePoint timer service made the delay activity work correctly
When they are initialized in the designer, setting the value to something else in the initialize event does not work
If you bind the timeout property to a dependency field then it can be set in the initialize timeout handler, much like SendEmailActivity properties

Robin Clowers