I’m coming to the conclusion that Beta 2 TR has broken Delay Activities…

What I did was build a test workflow. I’d got delay activities that weren’t working, and I wanted to investigate the possible factors involved.

I know that they were working just fine in Beta 2. I thought the difference here from what I was doing in Beta 2 was that I was setting the TimeoutDuration at runtime, through the InitializeTimeoutDuration function.

So I built a test workflow with 2 different parallel branches. One had a ‘static’ (design time) configured delay, and the other had a ‘dynamic’ (runtime) set delay. Both had an InitializeTimeoutDuration function set, though for the ‘static’ case all this did was log that it had been invoked.

I ran the workflow. My log file showed that the workflow ran both the InitializeTimeoutDuration functions, and nothing else.

Previously, I’d not run that function at all, so I tried configuring both Delays to not call InitializeTimeoutDuration. I ran the workflow, and again, nothing after the delays ever happened.

So I thought maybe it was because I had 2 delays. I disabled one sequence, and added a new second sequence that just contained a code step. I ran this – and again, anything after the Delay activity was never run.

In the end, I took one of the sequences outside the Parallel Activity. The workflow was now OnWorkflowActivated – Code – Delay – Code. And the second code step never runs.

I know this worked in Beta 2 – has the Tech Refresh broken this?

Comments from my old blog:

I got the same impression 😉 – Beta 2 TR has broken Delay Activities…

By Robert at 15:50:06 Tuesday 10th October 2006