Tuesday, July 08, 2008

VS 2008 - Designer error - Workflow & IIdentifierCreationService

Today I have come across this error on my Visual Studio 2008 whilst designing new Activities:

The service 'System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Design.IIdentifierCreationService' must be installed for this operation to succeed. Ensure that this service is available.

I found this entry “Making a Custom Activity Work in Your Project (even if you started with a class library) from Rob Bogue's blog.


Basically, I added a “C# class library” project to my Solution and then added classes and make them inherit from “System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Activity”.

I needed to edit the project file and add two things:

1. Some project type GUIDS

      <ProjectTypeGuids>{14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>

· {14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079}: This tells that it is a Workflow type project

· {FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}: This tells that it is a “C# Class Library” project

2. An import statement to import .NET 3.5 Workflow code into my project

      <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.5\Workflow.Targets" />


After that, I could see my activities in the Designer.

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