Workflow Activities

In addition to steps that books and tutorials everywhere will tell you, I found I had to take two extra steps to incorporate a custom activity in a custom workflow built in VS 2008:

1. Create a strongly-named / signed VS project for the Activity(s) separately from the Workflow project in which said Activity(s) would be used.
2. Deploy the activity project's .dll to the GAC before deploying the Workflow, in my case via the build script:

   "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\gacutil.exe" /i "

   HR New Hire Activity Library.dll"

Googling was required to find the above 2 steps. I would normally expect that the default Workflow build scripts would take care of things like that.