.NET Workflow Engine Suggestions

c# .net workflow state-machine stateless-state-machine
Leyu picture Leyu · Oct 27, 2009 · Viewed 12.5k times · Source

I came across stateless, a hierarchical state machine framework based on Simple State Machine for Boo, but configured using C# 3.0

It is easy to configure and use, I will probably use it soon.

But I was just wondering if

  • Anyone used stateless for real projects (If so what is your opinion?)
  • Are there any other good workflow engines for .NET? (other than WF)

Answer

Dave picture Dave · May 5, 2010

I've been using Stateless and WF for an app that is intended to go into production someday. :) I have detailed my experiences so far on my post here.

Overall, I prefer Stateless because it's simpler for more things that WF. Sure, it's nice to be able to design your workflow graphically, but when you need to implement something more difficult than a sequential workflow (like the state machine workflow), you'll need to work with ExternalDataExchange just to make the right state transitions. It's probably not hard, but considering that and the fact that you need to implement a persistence service to pause a workflow just seemed unappealing to me. I don't have a need to persist a workflow to disk for later execution anyway... so I will be using regular events to deal with this in Stateless. Error handling is easily doable in Stateless (I've been successful with it), but the implementation I've taken is questionable, and is the topic of another discussion (which I'm searching for now on SO!). I might be posting a question regarding this very soon.

Good luck with Stateless. I hope to hear how you've been progressing with it.

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