Killing my workflow softly

One of most exciting and most important features of the workflow foundation (WF) in .NET 3.0 is for sure “Workflow Persistence”. Because the WF is a framework designed for building of “long running” business processes (in this context known as workflows), there is a need for persisting of them.
There are out there in internet lot of posts and articles describing this feature. However, if you take a deeper look most of them describe this feature form the point of “dehydration” in a case of long running workflows. However, by increasing of runtime of one workflow increase also the probability of a failure. Because of this I build one example which focuses the persisting ability of the workflow in a case of crashing of the process which hosts the workflow.

For this reason I build the example which starts one simple workflow in separated process, which is killed and again started. The workflow just counts from 0 to 500 in the long running loop, which is placed in the transaction scope. Each time the counter is increased the transaction scope is exited and dehydration of the workflow is enforced.

If you want to get the real feeling how the workflow persistence in failure scenarios really works, just follow the example which can be downloaded here.