Many have asked. Many have said it is not possible. At the SharePoint Conference in Seattle today (March 4^th, 2008), Todd Bleeker is presenting the steps necessary to take a workflow created in SharePoint Designer and port/convert it to a workflow template in Visual Studio!

The process started with an innocent question back in the fall of 2007 at Mindsharp's TechWeek. All of the Mindsharp Authorized Trainers, and one lucky developer (me) we assembled to share what we know and learn from others. One session address this workflow topic. The session ended when the steps we attempted crashed the site collection. (Thank goodness for virtual machines!) The topic list of that week was submitted to Microsoft as potential sessions at the SharePoint Conference. They selected the workflow porting session to be presented.

The task fell to SharePoint MVP and superstar presenter Todd Bleeker. As usual, Todd threw his considerable enthusiasm at the topic. I had the privilege of being a second set of eyes and a sounding board to Todd during the days leading up the presentation. Not only did I learn a ton about workflows, but I also interacted with many smart people who contributed ideas, encouragement and humor to us in the last 48 hours. I am honored to be the one to make this post, but I am not solely responsible for its content. I want to specifically mention Todd Bleeker (of course), Kimmo Forss of Microsoft, Marilyn White of White Consulting, Rob Bogue of Thor Projects, David Mann of Mann Software and Woody Windischman.

[Details to follow]

I added a new operation to the Barracuda Application Extension Download:

stsadm -o enumsitegallerytemplates -site <site collection url>

   Displays the names and identifiers of Site Definitions in the Site Template Gallery.

Barracuda StsAdm Extensions.wsp (8.01 KB)

If you live in the Midwest and are not going to Las Vegas on November 9th, make plans to attend the MOSS Camp - Chicago.

One common pain point for SharePoint administrators is the Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service, also known as OWSTIMER.EXE. The Timer Service is responsible for executing several processes that are part of the product. A few of the more well-known processes are the search crawl refresh, recycle bin processing and the workflow processes. Also, the Timer Service is the process that SharePoint uses to push web.config modifications and solutions to all front end servers in the farm.

Two specific issues that are related to the Timer Service are its memory consumption and limited user interface. The Application Extension Download for SharePoint (AED for SharePoint) from Barracuda is designed to help system administrators deal with these issues. The download can be found in the Premium Content section of the Mindsharp web site. (The utility is free, but you will need to provide your name and email.)

Timer Operations Syntax

Restart Timer

stsadm -o restarttimer
{ -farm | -server <server name>;<server name> }
[-exclude <server name>;<server name>]
 
Restarts the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service
on servers in the farm.
 
Use the -farm parameter to restart the service on all servers
in the farm that have the service installed.
 
Use the -server parameter to specify the servers on which to
restart the service.
 
Use the -exclude parameter in conjuction with -farm to restart
the service on all servers except those listed.
 

Enumerate Timer Jobs

stsadm -o enumtimerjobs
[-view {service | webapp}]
[-service <service name>]
[-webapp <web application url>]
[-schedule]
 
Displays the Timer Job Definition information.
 

Start Timer Job

stsadm -o starttimerjob
{ -service <service name> | -webapp <web application url> }
-job <job name>
 
Forces a one-time execution of the specified job.

At my new job, I work with a lot of very smart people. I was chatting with Ben Curry, and he remarked about the troubles that a lot of administrators have with the OWSTimer.exe program. So, I wrote an extension to STSADM that will help manage this program. You can find the Adminstration Extension Download for SharePoint on the Mindsharp site.

Feedback is appreciated. Paul at barracada.net

I found a particularly interesting comment on the Technet Script Center page for Scheduled Tasks:

Note that this class can only return jobs that are created using either a script or AT.exe. It cannot return information about jobs that are either created by or modified by the Scheduled Task wizard.

A search of the .Net Framework turned up empty. As far as I can tell, schtasks.exe is the way to go if you want the end-users to be able to change the default entry…

UPDATED June 14, 2007:   I used the Task Scheduler library from Code Project. 

I want to thank the group from PointBridge for the wonderful evening. Ethan, Bert, et. al. were a pleasure to meet!