I mentioned a little earlier I was going to be contributing to the castle project. That’s done now - it’s a facility which can be added to the Inversion of Control Container to integrate the Workflow Foundation into your castle based application. I know it’s sort of a niche need. Just like when you’re developing rails and mvc apps you should always go for the least code possible to implement a feature. (But no less.)

However there may be times where you’re doing significant after-page processing, or when you’re interacting with a long-running living workflow. In those cases the various calls into the web app are touching on an instance of a complex activity to see it’s progress or status, provide additional information as you go, or have different people of different roles moving things along.

The Workflow Foundation is one of the ways you can skin that cat. Depending on the specifics of the situation (and how you use it) WF can be a pretty attractive option. Of course something like using active record to manage activity state relationally is also perfectly fine. As always though it’s something you want to take a look to see if it makes sense or not for your use case.