Develop Sharepoint 2013 365 Workflow in Visual Studio

Question

My clients have bought an Office 365 SharePoint 2013 site and I'm in the process of configuring it.

Their business rules require a very complicated Workflow which can just about be developed in SharePoint Designer. However, as I'm an experienced Visual Studio .NET developer I'd rather do it programmatically and hopefully save some time.

At present I can't figure out how to connect my desktop version of Visual Studio to the Cloud-based SharePoint site. I've downloaded the Workflow Manager tool but I'm struggling to figure out how to configure the Farm Databases etc. Available documentation seems patchy.

Has anyone out there found a way of doing this? This link suggests that it might not be possible.

Thanks

Edward

Answer 1

According to this article it's possible, though probably not really nice. You will have to deploy your Workflow as a SharePoint App. Which means you will only be able to call the webservices.

Another option which might be worth looking at is Nintex, which has a module for office 365 as well. Nintex has alot of useful functions, though I don't know how good the office 365 version is. You would have to check whether it suits your requirements.