The last week i had the pleasure to attend to a presentation about the workflow development for Microsoft Office Sharepoint 2007 using the new version of the Visual Studio Tools for Office  (Visual Studio Tools for Office V3.0) and I have to admit that I'm very glad with this new stuff for developer, I think that the Microsoft internal groups are working very synchronized in order to provide a great experience not just for developers but for the entire IT comunity.  This new version include a lot of improvements that includes:

  • You use the same designer tool that the one used for non sharepoint oriented workflows, with this you speed up your developer's learning curve.
  • You can choose between Visual Basic and Visual C# .net.
  • Includes two workflow template for each language.
  • Debugging!!!!!  (I love how it sounds Wink)
  • Improved workflow deployment.
  • You can develop sequential or state machine workflows.

Despite the fact that this set of tools are very stable, and I've playing a log with it and it's very easy to use it, you have to take some consideration before playing with it, i think that the most important is that you have to install Visual Studio and VSTO v3.0 in the same machine in which you are running MOSS and want to register the workflow.  This is required because you have to take the control of the different events in that machine in order to debug them, once you have the workflow tested you can deploy it to a different server by registering the XML manifesto.