Custom WorkFlow deployement in Visual Studio 2008

If you’re using Visual Studio 2008 the workflow will have been automatically deployed to the site collection you specified as the development site when you first created the workflow project. However should you need to deploy the workflow to a different server or site collection then these are the steps that you’ll need.

The following steps will deploy your workflow to a site collection.

1. Copy the DLL your workflow creates from the build directory (\bin\Debug) to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

2. Create a directory in the features directory [C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES] and drop both the feature.xml and workflow.xml files into the directory.

3. Install the feature on your farm, using the following command line statements

stsadm -o installfeature -name DocumentMoveAndShortcut

Figure 18 - Install the feature

4. Activate the feature to a site collection

stsadm -o activatefeature –name DocumentMoveAndShortcut -url http://moss2007win2008

Figure 19 - Activate the feature

NOTE: You can usually find the STSADM command in the directory C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN