October 24, 2005 spout

Typed WF Communications Details

If you downloaded the samples from my previous two forays into WF communications programming, you probably couldn’t get them to build. The problem is that when I packaged things up, I removed the bin directories. I haven’t figured out just why this causes everything to stop building, but with the help of Dennis Pilarinos, I rearranged the two projects into three:

  1. communications interface (CommunicationLibrary): the data exchange service interface definition, compiles into CommunicationLibrary.dll

  2. communications activities (WorkflowProject1): uses a pre-build step to generate the typed activities generated from the communications library using the wca tool, references CommunicationLibrary.dll and compiles into WorkflowProject1.dll (nice name, eh? : )

  3. application (EventSinkAndMethodInvoke2): the app that uses the typed activities, references both CommunicationLibrary.dll and WorkflowProject1.dll

It’s only by separating the communications activities into a separate assembly that things can build and rebuild reliably. You can download the newly configured code here. Enjoy.