title: Alternatives to Windows Workflow Foundation?
body: <p>I've been using WWF for a while as part of an internal call center application (ASP.NET), and while learning it was a good practice in understanding how a state machine based workflow system <em>should</em> work, I am definitely not in love with WWF itself. In my opinion it is:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Overly complex, especially for use within web apps (all that threaded runtime stuff)</li>
  <li>Immature (ever worked with that horrible designer?)</li>
  <li>Anemic in its current feature set</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Does anyone have a suggestion for a better .NET based workflow framework?  Specifically, I am looking for the following features:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>State machine based (mapping states to available actions)</li>
  <li>A focus on user permissions (controlling who has access to what actions)</li>
  <li>The ability to run workflows as timed background tasks (for example, to send out reminders for items that have been sitting in a certain state for x days)</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>That's really all I need. I don't need to be able to "drag and drop" any activities or visually design the flow. I am perfectly comfortable writing actual code once a particular action is triggered.</p>