Cliff Simpkins in CSD, replied very promptly to my post over the weekend asking why there was no Visual Studio in the WF tutorials.

It turns out that the tutorials I was looking at were old versions from the original .NET Framework SDK. The SDK clearly doesn't include Visual Studio, hence no mention of Visual Studio. That makes sense.

For whatever reason, the tutorial links that are on the Windows Workflow Foundation Tutorials page in the MSDN Library link to the old, SDK-only versions of the tutorials. MSDN is working on getting those updated to link to the modern versions of the tutorials. That might take a week or so if there are other priority things in the MSDN queue.

In the meantime, you can get to all of the modern versions of the WF tutorials by navigating the tutorials using the tree view on the left. I think you want to use this exclusively until MSDN fixes all the links.

The modern versions of the tutorials guide you through using either Visual Studio or a POTE (plain old text editor). Sweetness.

You can tell if you are looking at an old SDK-only version of a tutorial because the tree view on the left will be severely truncated and not show the page you are viewing, and the navigation controls at the top of the right page will only show "MSDN | MSDN Library" instead of several additional levels.

Additional resources

Cliff also pointed me to some other WF resources to share. First stop is the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow (score bonus points for the cool URL.)

Next up, HelpDesk v1.0 is a sample web app that demonstrates WF on TryIt Channel9.

Finally, there is a nascent collection of Windows Workflow Foundation articles and overviews on MSDN. Good stuff there, and I expect more over time as Microsoft continues investing in WF.