How to host long running WF 4.0 workflows from an ASP.Net website

My web site needs to initiate long-running workflows in which activities could pause for some large amount of time. Specifically, an activity will send the user an email containing a URL to follow and the workflow should not then continue until the user has visited that URL and performed an action there.

How can I 开发者_Go百科host the workflow in such a way that my web site can interact with it as described? I am restricted to Windows 2003 Server and so AppFabric is not an available option for me.

All the text in the books is around either short-running workflows that exist in the lifetime of a web page or are using WF 3.0 which isn't what I want to use, so aren't relevant.

Many thanks,

Steve.

We have managed to do this & works well. You have to use the persistence to load/unload the workflow. However in retrospect, it would have been MUCH better to have hosted the workflow within a windows service & to communicate with it using wcf.

The persistence is quite buggy & some things just don't work well, like timed activities. It also makes your web app huge as you have to have all that workflow code in it.

WF 4.0 might be better, but I still think hosting the workflow in a separate service is the way to go.