A Discussion with my Team Lead on Workflows and AppFabric Persistence Store

I just had a discussion with my team lead regarding her knowledge on workflows. I will just share to you what she taught me.

• The ServiceDeploymentsTable in the Persistence Store lists all of the workflow services that are hosted.
• The InstancesTable lists out the instances of your workflows. It also shows the status of each workflow instance. To locate your workflow instances in the InstancesTable, get the Id in the ServiceDeploymentsTable and map it with the ServiceDeploymentId in the InstancesTable
• In the InstancesTable, there are two important columns one needs to check (especially for workflow schedulers): PendingTimer and the BlockingBookmarks
• PendingTimer shows the time when the workflow instance will wake up. The time here is in GMT +0. So, for example, if you are in the Philippines (GMT +8) and the PendingTime shows 07:50, your workflow will wake up at 15:50pm.
• BlockingBookmarks shows what is the current workflow activity. Personally, this is applicable if you have a PickBranch activity.
  
  For example, you have a DelayBranch and a StopBranch. According to her, if the current activity is now in the DelayBranch, the BlockingBookmarks will show "StopBranch" because it is waiting for the StopBranch to be triggered and that the DelayBranch is currently working.
  

These are just some of the items that I've learned from her. I hope this helps you understand some of the things with the AppFabric Persistence Store

Happy coding!