I'm starting to think that I should ditch Windows WF in favor of something simpler. I don't necessarily need to pause workflow execution for extended periods of time and restore them later. I would like a simple state machine framework that does have basic suspend / resume / abort (without serialization), however.
I've downloaded the Stateless framework from Google Code and am going to start playing with it, but would love to hear what the other .NET programmers out there are using.
EDIT Stateless seems really simple to implement, but I do wonder if it's the right thing for a candy machine. In automation, I always feel conflicted about how state machines should be used. Although I use the term "state machine", I do so loosely because I use it more like a flow chart. Instead of using states to represent the current mode a machine is in, I use it to execute functions. So in this case with Stateless, I'd actually be using the transition from one state to the next as the mechanism for calling functions in my candy machine's controller. Thoughts?
As I work through this, I'll try to list some of the things I'm finding. Most will likely be a bit superficial from an analysis standpoint (especially since I'm new to both frameworks), but hopefully it will help someone out.
Stateless
Pros
Cons
Windows Workflow Foundation
Pros
Cons