Windows Workflow Foundation - Application-Integrated Debugging
- by user292103
I've got a typical n-tier app that has a heavy workflow component to it, so I'm interested in using WWF. There's a server-side piece that runs as a Windows Service, and there's the client-side piece written in Silverlight.
To have a really great, seamlessly integrated experience for my users, what I want is to incorporate both a workflow designer and a workflow debugger into the application. Not Visual Studio, but something tightly integrated right into the app itself. Using the Silverlight client, the user (probably more of a power user) can design workflows. But not only that, they can open a debugger from within the Silverlight client, set breakpoints (which are really remote breakpoints back to the Windows Service), catch in-process workflows, and step through them.
Wouldn't that be great? I think I have some idea how I might go about incorporating an integrated designer (use a Silverlight diagramming component, save the diagram to .XAML, parse the .XAML to re-create the diagram, etc., etc.) but how on Earth would I do the debugger? I have no idea how I would do that part. Is there some kind of debugging support engineered into WWF?
