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Rules and Conditions Overview 

Windows Workflow Foundation provides rules and conditions as two mechanisms for defining business logic in your workflows. Conditions are used by IfElseBranchActivity activities and ConditionedActivityGroup activities to control activity execution. Rules are a much more robust form of conditions that enable you to programmatically, or through an XML file, define what business rules your workflows must follow. From simple activity conditions to sophisticated forward-chaining rule sets, this technology enables you to seamlessly integrate rules support into your workflows.

A key advantage of defining your logic with rules is that the rules can be modified at run time by using workflow changes. In addition, rules let you separate your business logic from a workflow in order to share those rules with other workflows. Finally, defining business logic in rules allows for advanced tools to be built on top of the object model.

For more information about conditions, see Using Conditions in Workflows and for information on rules, see Using RuleSets in Workflows.

See Also

Concepts

How to: Use Conditions Through Code
Using the PolicyActivity Activity

Other Resources

Windows Workflow Foundation

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