Bringing Visual Studio’s built-in Workflow Designer to CoreWF

[ema2ooo]

Hi everyone,

I’ve released CoreWF Visual Studio Patch, an unofficial patch that lets modern .NET/CoreWF projects use Visual Studio’s built-in Workflow Designer and standard Toolbox.

It supports:

• Opening and editing workflow XAML directly inside Visual Studio.
• Discovering custom activities after a build and adding them from the Toolbox.
• Creating Sequence, Flowchart, and State Machine workflows using CoreWF item templates.
• Showing the appropriate workflow templates for modern .NET and .NET Framework projects.

The designer continues to run on .NET Framework, while workflow execution stays in your application’s modern .NET/CoreWF runtime.

The installer lets you select a Visual Studio installation, checks component compatibility, and keeps verified local backups for repair and uninstall. Changes are generated locally after your consent—no original or modified Microsoft DLLs are distributed.

Validation covers Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio 2026 components, with template creation and filtering also checked directly in Visual Studio 2022.

Source and documentation:
https://github.com/ema2ooo/CoreWF-VisualStudio-Patch

Installer and release notes:
https://github.com/ema2ooo/CoreWF-VisualStudio-Patch/releases/tag/v0.1.0

I’d welcome feedback, especially from anyone migrating existing WF projects or using custom activities with CoreWF.