The best session so far at SPC 08 was Todd Bleeker's inspirational talk on the daunting task of migrating SharePoint Designer workflows to Visual Studio.

Often customers want to take a specific SPD workflow and use it on different lists - but as most of you know, this is not possible because an SPD workflow is tied to one list, and one list only. If you need to attach a workflow to several lists in a site collection, you are forced to build the workflow from scratch in Visual Studio.

Until now. Todd Bleeker went through the process of migrating a simple SPD workflow to Visual Studio. And it's difficult! And time-consuming.

Basically, you need to go through a long process of importing files, renaming variables, attaching new dll's, changing XML and loads more. It's not for the faint of heart and at the moment you're not likely to be using this method for other than proof-of-concept projects.

However, Todd is working with Paul Schaeflein and Mindsharp to automate the tedious migration process and he indicated that their efforts may result in a turn-key product sometime in the future.

The one great use of the migration method is prototyping, i.e. you can let your users develop a workflow in SharePoint Designer with most of the functionality added. All the kinks can be ironed out in this phase and once the user is happy with the workflow, the developer can take over and migrate the workflow to Visual Studio. The advantage of this approach is that you free up developer resources and eliminate much of the development time where the developer and user need to communicate about tweaks, changes etc.

You can read more about the step-by-step migration process at Paul Schaefleins blog: http://mindsharpblogs.com/paul/archive/2008/03/03/4399.aspx. More details should follow soon.