We recently received an e-mail from a gentleman who was having trouble publishing a workflow rule from our Advanced Workflow Programming chapter from our recent Programming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 book. This chapter showed how to create custom declarative WF XAML workflow rules and install them within Dynamics CRM 4.0.

While this technique was never officially supported, early SDK documentation existed that demonstrated how to create custom WF XAML workflow rules and install them to Dynamics CRM 4.0. Further, multiple books (including ours) helped to further demonstrate the power of WF within CRM.

However, sure enough, we tried out our example this week and discovered the same “Workflows created outside of CRM are not supported” error. The only change that we noticed was that our system was now on Update Rollup 2 (as was the system of the individual who originally e-mailed me). I checked with the product team and apparently this ability was disabled with Update Rollup 1 due to some stability issues. We generally used the more customary workflow activity assembly approach in most of our implementations, so we hadn’t yet noticed this change with the rollup installation.

So, I am sorry to say that at this time you will be unable to create custom declarative WF rules, even in an unsupported state, if you install any of the CRM rollups. For on-premise and partner hosted deployments, you will need to continue to use custom workflow activities approach. For Dynamics CRM Online, your workflow rules will be limited to what the workflow editor from CRM user-interface allows.