For better or worse, we're planning on putting the state machine workflow design surface in front of non-developers. We have a couple of activities to help them make the whole thing a bit less tedious, but it still feels pretty developer-centric.
One thing I'd like to be able to do is to re-label the event drive activities in the state machine diagram. Presently, their labels are their object names (sensible - from a developer's perspective) and thus have to be unique. I'd like to put on something more reflective of the event that's being handled...which could be handled from multiple states. For example, I have a lot of states where a user might "Sign" or "Complete" the document under the workflow. Right now, I'm making the event driven activity names be reflective of both the state and event..."InProgressSign" or "CheckedOutSign".
The descriptions don't seem to show up anywhere. I think I'd prefer to employ these in the diagram, but I'm at a loss as to how I'd do that. Is this possible Are there other approaches others have taken Thoughts on the matter appreciated.
Slightly Friendlier Design Surface
Perlman
Juan P. Arellano
Clay - you pretty much have total control once you go this route. One idea might be to use something like this sample http://www.thispointer.com/pivot/entry.php id=167 (a freeform designer).
Another would be to just intercept things going in an out of the designer (like swap the name and description properties when you pass an activity to the designer, and swap them back when you serialize the activity tree back into XOML).