As noted in a former post, I implemented a change order system using Windows Workflow. Recently, the system was deployed for User Acceptance Testing and odd things began to happen. The system is using both tracking and persistence services and what we observed in the Sql Profiler was that the Sql to insert the persistence record was never making it to the database, but the tracking was working fine.
I implemented a handler for the ServicesExceptionNotHandled event on the WorkflowRuntime object, but nothing was being raised. After a couple of hours poking and prodding, I finally linked the problem to the windows firewall. If the firewall was turned off, everything worked as expected. I spent some time researching the problem and found a couple of posts on the Microsoft Forums here and here that discuss the SharedConnectionWorkflowTransactionService. Apparently, when the persistence and tracking data are in two different databases, the DTC gets involved any updates to the data and the firewall was blocking the DTC traffic.
As mentioned in one of these posts, I combined the persistence and tracking databases into one, and added the SharedConnectionWorkflowTransactionService to runtime when I started up. The combination of these actions removed the dependency on the DTC and all is working fine, now.
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