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Workflows using CoreWF in .net core

Workflow Foundation is a great tool when designing workflows for .net. Unfortunately, just like WCF, that technology is not going to be ported to .net core. However, a company named UI Path (https://www.uipath.com/)  that heavily relies on Windows Workflow Foundation, has started an unofficial port to .net (https://github.com/UiPath-Open/corewf).

In order to see how compatible would be the the new port with the current Windows Workflow for simple workflows, I created a playground project at  https://github.com/jptarqu/WorkflowForCorePlayground . The Visual Studio solution contains two projects:


  1. WorkflowForCorePlayground : a VB.net Windows Workflow project created using the VS template for .net 4.8. 
  2. CoreWfSample : a .net core console app that runs a cleaned version of the same xaml that project #1 has.
The idea is to explore the possibility of still having business users design the workflow using the regular .net framework 4.8 beautiful and easy-to-use designer, while still been able to run the workflow in .net, in for example an Azure Server-less Function. Obviously,  not all Workflow Activities would work with .net core, but hopefully simple workflows and flow charts encapsulating business rules can be used.

In order to use the CoreWF you must install the nuget in your project. But the nuget does not seem to be in Nuget.org, so you have to add the following url to yur nuget sources in Visual Studio:

https://www.myget.org/F/uipath-dev/api/v3/index.json

The .net core project works without needing to modfiy the xaml. I was able to copy and paste the xaml code from the xaml generated by the visual studio designer into the xaml file in my .net core.

My next experiment is to try creating an Azure Function that runs the xaml workflow.


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