Workflows become harder to manage visually as they grow, so the WF Team has provided another way to visual see and navigate through all of the components within a workflow. The workflow below

can be drilled into by double clicking on each of it's components, but if you want to see a tree view representation of the workflow at one time, the Document Outline window can be used, so that components within the workflow can be expanded, revealing a hierarchical view of the workflow. To view a workflow using the document outline window, make sure the workflow is open within the designer and then click on View->Other Windows->Document Outline

Each section of the workflow within the tree view can be expanded displaying additional activties represented within a hierarchical view. Below shows each of the "WaitForResponse" bookmark activities used within the triggers for transitions.

When an item within the tree view is clicked, the corresponding part of the workflow is represented with what was clicked on within the tree. Above, I clicked on the bookmark activity within the Else part of the If activity, for the "Start Engine" state, therefore that part of the workflow was highlighted within the designer. Take advantage of this new representation for navigating through a workflow in WF4.5 when workflows get so big they become tuff to navigate.

The WF Team has decided to deprecate the following WF3 types with the lastest release of WF4.5:

• System.Workflow.Activities.dll
• System.Workflow.ComponentModel.dll
• System.Workflow.Runtime.dll
• System.WorkflowServices.dll
• Microsoft.Workflow.DebugController.dll
• Microsoft.Workflow.Compiler.exe
• Wfc.exe

At this point it will not affect workflows built using WF3 other than a build warning that is encountered saying, "Warning BC40000: TYPE is obsolete: 'WF 3 types are deprecated. Please use WF 4 instead'". The WF Team is saying that the types will eventually be removed (post-.Net 4.5), so this is a great indication to start converting those WF3.x workflows... If you need help you can always ping me:)

Since there is not a replacement in WF4.x for System.Workflow.Activities.Rules or the rules engine, they are not being deprecated, however there are other alternatives for building rules within WF4.x using the workflows themselves. The WF Team's official post about the deprecation can be found here.