A presentation on the best practices for developing custom activities for use in SharePoint Designer.

2. WHAT ARE ACTIVITIES?

3. JUST OPEN STUDIO AND CRANK OUT A
WORKFLOW, RIGHT?
Right, for state machines. Pending Approval
 Budgeting  Review  Pending Approval
But not always for specific needs not given
out of the box
Custom integrations
Specific approval chains
Intranet/Extranet Communication

4. WHY CUSTOM ACTIVITIES
Updating the activities is done with solution
updates just like VS workflows
Business users can be in charge of the
process and how it evolves, not the
developer
Developing processes at the activity
level, forces you to think of the process in
components which leads to adaptability

5. THE CUSTOM ACTIVITY COMMANDMENTS
Thou shalt check the out of the box
functionality first
Thou shalt retain control of things better left
to developers, i.e. No delete WebApplication
actions

7. COMMON HEADACHES
The action is not showing up in designer
 Ensure you have created your ACTIONS file and deployed it to the
proper location, likely: %14%TEMPLATE1033Workflow
 Did you forget to sign the activities library DLL?
 Did you ensure the assembly was added to your SharePoint
package?

8. COMMON HEADACHES
The action is available, but selecting it does
nothing
 Ensure you have added your actions library DLL to the
AuthorizedTypes node in the web.config of the we application under
test
 Ensure there are no errors in your AuthorizedTypes entry, i.e. a
missing space or an additional line

9. RESOURCES
 Well written custom  Itemized steps to
activities library for create custom
reference actions
spdactivities Sundar on custom
activities