Building C# projects with Windows Workflow

After reading a post about using Windows Workflow to build an SMTP server, I started thinking of something I could use WF for outside the world of business processes. For a long while I've also been planning on automating my build processes for various projects I've got on the go. I then realised I could combine the two and develop an automated build system with WF. At this point, if you have any experience of automated builds, you're probably thinking "Why the hell don't you use NAnt or MSBuild like any normal person?", which is a fair point.

But using WF has a few advantages. First, as far as I'm aware NAnt and MSBuild don't provide a graphical designer for their build projects (I'm quite happy to be proved wrong on this point) whereas I was able to knock together a designer based on the Microsoft example pretty quickly. Second, I just wanted to use WF for something not related to business processes. It is a very flexible technology and I'm not sure people have realised its potential. I blame the name, which makes everyone assume WF has something to do with workflow, which for many people has a very particular meaning. Third, a WF solution shares the main advantage of NAnt and MSBuild, the build scripts can be simple XML files. To be fair it does currently depend on Visual Studio being installed, although I'm sure I could build projects using the C# compiler directly (probably taking advantage of the MSBuild API in fact!).

So after a couple of hours work I had a few activities, a designer and a command-line application to run the workflow XOML (see my previous post) and a working build system. OK, I still have some tidying up to do but I was amazed at what I'd managed to achieve. After some more work I'll dump my code somewhere for people to play with.

Another take on this may be to use the WF designer to generate NAnt and MSBuild XML files directly. My understanding is that WF provides support for using your own custom DSLs. Something else to look at...

Update – You can now download the source code here. The only warranty that comes with it is that “it works on my machine”. In fact it’s quite possible it won’t work on your machine since some of the locations are hardcoded. There are four projects, one is the workflow designer control, then there is a GUI application that uses that control, there’s an assembly full of activities (some of which could be useful in other workflows) and finally there is a console application that can be used to run your build from the command line.