I've been playing with the Workflow designer hosting for a little while, trying to get my head around the MSDN article that got published and I'm feeling reasonably happy with it.

I've managed to get my little designer host to the point where it can display XAML based workflow definitions on the screen along with the property grid, declarative property binding, toolbox support, menu support and loading/saving workflow definitions to files.

The previous posts are here;

  1. Getting Started
  2. Adding the Property Grid
  3. Adding a WorkflowDesignerLoader
  4. Adding the Toolbox Support
  5. TypeProviders and Property Values
  6. Adding Menu Support
  7. Saving Work

At the end of that I'm still missing functionality in that I don't support generating code in any fashion (including adding fields/properties/events) and I don't support adding rules either but I can work declaratively.

I updated the project that ended up with after step 6 to make it a little more useful (added a File->New and a File->Close and so on) and I also added in a little project which lets you load up a XAML based workflow and run it;

Note that these are both pretty basic and are by no means meant to represent "best practise" or anything like that.

I made a little video of these things "in action" and put that here as well;

There's no more coming from me on designer hosting for a little while :-)