I spent some time today digging into the Persistence and Tracking services available within Windows Workflow.  During my escapades I came across the following set of articles that provided some useful information for building a basic understanding of these two key services within Workflow.  Depending on how some things unfold, we may need to write a tracking and persistence service that works against an Oracle database.  Since we support both SQL Server and Oracle, and since WF doesn't provide base classes and/or interfaces for some key infrastructure classes (SqlTrackingQuery, SqlTrackingQueryOptions, SqlTrackingWorkflowInstance, etc.), we may need to write wrapper classes that allow us to work against a configurable persistence and tracking service. 

Persistence Service

• Windows Workflow Foundation Runtime Services: The Persistence Service
• Workflow Tools
• Oracle Persistence Service
• Performing Transactions in Windows Workflow
• Execute Long Running Workflow Using Persistence

Tracking Service

• Foundations: Tracking Services in Windows Workflow Foundation
• Writing Tracking Services for Windows Workflow Foundation
• Tracking Services Deep Dive

Sam is getting to have all the fun at work exploring Windows Workflow :(  It looks like he's making some good progress so perhaps I'll get a chance to experiment some in the near future as we look to find ways to incorporate it into our application. 

While I've done very little real work with Windows Workflow I have read Essential Windows Workflow Foundation and Presenting Windows Workflow Foundation to give me a good background for what it includes.  I certainly see a lot of potential uses for workflow within our application so now it's just a matter of figuring out how to incorporate it into our architecture and frameworks.  Since it doesn't exactly plugin right out of the box, we have a good amount of work ahead of us.  As I said in my "The the right time for a new technology" post, I'm about ready for something new anyway so it should be fun!