Microsoft® Windows® Workflow Foundation Step by Step

Starting a Workflow Instance with Parameters

Workflow instances that take input parameters upon startup accept those parameters as public properties. That is, to pass in a variable delay value, we need only to create a public Delay property on our workflow instance and then provide the delay value when we create the instance. If you’re familiar with XML Serialization and the XmlSerializer in .NET, the process for creating a workflow instance is similar to the process of deserializing an XML stream into a living .NET object. In fact, this is very nearly what happens.

The arguments that a workflow instance expects are passed in as values in a dictionary object that uses a string as a key and a simple object type as the value. Typically, code such ...