In this Two Minute WF, we’ll talk about the WorkflowRuntime.

The WorkflowRuntime is the service that coordinates the execution of workflows and the services that workflows use. Once you’ve defined a workflow using the various activities you need the workflow to perform, you tell the WorkflowRuntime to create an instance of that workflow and start it running. The WorkflowRuntime uses the various services available to it to start the workflow instance running on a thread, persist the workflow when it becomes idle, and generally manage the execution of the workflow.

The WorkflowRuntime provides events you can handle to let you know when significant things happen like when a WorkflowInstance is finished running, has thrown an exception, or has been terminated. You can also use the WorkflowRuntime to enumerate the list of currently loaded workflows or retrieve references to workflow-related services.

You can only have one WorkflowRuntime per AppDomain (generally this means you get one per application), so in more than the simplest application it can be kind of tricky to manage your WorkflowRuntime.

For example, say you have an object that needs to know when a workflow completes. You might have that object subscribe to the WorkflowRuntime.WorkflowCompleted event. Later, you might no longer need that object so you stop referencing it and assume the garbage collector will clean it up for you… but it won’t. Why? Because it’s still subscribed to the WorkflowRuntime.WorkflowCompleted event so there’s still a reference to it. This sort of thing becomes a little tricky particularly in applications like an ASP.NET web app where a page instance might need to know when a workflow it started is done running. (There are other issues with using workflows in ASP.NET that I’ll get into in a later topic.)

There’s a lot to consider when working with WorkflowRuntime, but it does a lot of the work for you. Once you get your head wrapped around it, WorkflowRuntime is your best friend in Windows Workflow Foudnation. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other, so get to know it.