Persistence services are responsible for storing and retrieving (loading and unloading) workflow instance state. WF provides an out-of-box SQL-based implementation of the persistence service: SqlWorkflowPersistenceService.

Two shared members GetDefaultSerializedForm and RestoreFromDefaultSerializedForm are used to save and restore the workflow to an array of bytes.

A WorkflowOwnershipException is reaised when the workflow runtime tries to either load or persist a workflow that is no longer owns.