Dynamic Workflow Instrumentation for Windows Workflow Foundation

As the complexity of business processes grows, the shift towards workflow-based programming becomes more attractive. The typical long-running characteristic of workflows imposes new challenges such as dynamic adaptation of running workflow instances. Recently, Windows Workflow Foundation (in short WF) was released by Microsoft as their solution for workflow-driven application development. Although WF contains features that allow dynamic workflow adaptation, the framework lacks an instrumentation framework to make such adaptations more manageable. Therefore, we built an instrumentation framework that provides more flexibility for applying workflow adaptation batches to workflow instances, both at creation time and during an instance's lifecycle. In this paper we present this workflow instrumentation framework and performance implications caused by dynamic workflow adaptation are detailed.