Basic Activity Designer WWF4.0

ActivityDesigner
(System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Design)

Activitydesigner is a class it provides a simple designer which lets the user visually design activities in the design mode.

ActivityDesigner provides a simple mechanism for the activities so they can participate in rendering the workflow on the design surface.

Activitydesginer class provides following designer features.

Rendering support by drawing icons, description, border, interior, and background.

• Rendering help text.
• Default glyphs required by designers.
• Filtering design-time-specific properties.
• Default event generation.
• Default hit testing.
• Triggering validation.
• Tool-tip support.
• Participation in keyboard navigation.
• Accessibility support.
• Toolbox support.
• Theme support.
• Smart tag support.
• Message filtering support.
• Event handling for mouse events.

Activity designers that support creating activities that have children—composite activities—must inherit from the CompositeActivityDesigner class in the System.Workflow.ComponentModel.Design namespace.

The CompositeActivityDesigner class provides the following designer features:

Expanding and collapsing the designers.
Drag-and-drop indicators.
Layout of self and child activities.
Drawing self and child activities.
Hit testing the child activities.
Inserting and removing activities from a hierarchy.

Following are different types of activitydesginers

ActivityDesigner
CompositeActivityDesigner
FreeformActivityDesigner
ParallelActivityDesigner
SequenceDesigner
SequentialActivityDesigner
SequentialWorkflowRootDesigner
StructuredCompositeActivityDesigner

reference from msdn