Sharepoint Workflow Development (2 part question)

Question

I'm trying to develop some SharePoint workflows for the company I work for, and I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of the technology. Normally when I want to familiarize myself with something, I just play with it, look at the properties, find all the methods, etc.

When I fire up Visual Studio and try to create a SharePoint workflow, it gives me an error indicating I don't have a reference to "Microsoft.SharePoint.dll". Someone told me that it was normal to see that because you have to do all your development on the SharePoint Server itself if you want to do workflows. Is this true?

If so, is there anyone out there that has successfully developed SharePoint workflows in a multi-developer environment without resorting to any "hacks"?? Thank you for reading and your responses...

Answer 1

Also, it was casually mentioned in this thread, but you cannot develop SharePoint workflows on a 64-bit SharePoint Server at this time. You will have to have a 32-bit Windows Server and SharePoint Server installation.

Answer 2

While it's true you need SharePoint installed on your development computer for most SharePoint development, you can get away without it for workflow development. Follow these steps:

• Copy the SharePoint DLLs to your development computer (for workflow you'll need microsoft.sharepoint.WorkflowActions.dll).
• Open Visual Studio and open the Toolbox tab
• Add a new tab (call it SharePoint Workflow Items)
• In the new tab, click "Add Items"
• Click the "Activities" tab
• Locate and add microsoft.sharepoint.WorkflowActions.dll
• You'll see a few new tasks show up and already selected.

Once you do this, you'll be able to develop WF workflows that can use SharePoint-specific tasks. Deployment and testing the workflow is another task altogether.

Answer 3

If you want to create a Sharepoint workflow using the Sharepoint Templates, you need to have a Windows 2003 or 2008 Server running Sharepoint. Essentially, that is true for all Sharepoint development: For it to be really efficient, you need to run Visual Studio on a Sharepoint Server. This in turn means that every developer needs his own Sharepoint server and then you have one additional "Staging"-Server where you deploy and test your combined solutions. Suddenly, that MSDN Subscription looks very attractive :-)

As for your Workflow learning question: I can highly recommend "Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System" by Apress.

Answer 4

Yes, you have to do all your development on a the SharePoint server itself. Consider using a virtual machine and package up features that you can deploy to your staging and production environments.

http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/archive/2007/02/23/build-a-sharepoint-development-machine.aspx http://www.wssdemo.com/Pages/EntDev.aspx

Answer 5

Yes, you can develop SharePoint Workflows, WebParts, etc. in a multi-developer environment without any hacks. I suggest you use

• a MOSS 2007 VPC Image
• Ankhsvn to use svn inside Visual Studio
• and also the WSPBuilder Extensions

and maybe you should read What are your biggest complaints about Sharepoint? to see what you're up to ;-)

To learn SharePoint Workflow development,you can start at Step by Step Tutorial. Creating Workflows for Windows Sharepoint Services and MOSS2007

Answer 6

Here is a link to some SharePoint workflow how to videos.

http://chrisbarba.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/sharepoint-workflow-how-to-videos/