R – Migrating a SharePoint Designer Workflow into Visual Studio Workflow

If you want to create a Sharepoint workflow using the Sharepoint Templates, you need to have a Windows 2003 or 2008 Server running Sharepoint. Essentially, that is true for all Sharepoint development: For it to be really efficient, you need to run Visual Studio on a Sharepoint Server. This in turn means that every developer needs his own Sharepoint server and then you have one additional "Staging"-Server where you deploy and test your combined solutions. Suddenly, that MSDN Subscription looks very attractive :-)

As for your Workflow learning question: I can highly recommend "Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System" by Apress.

I'm guessing this has to do with the workflow being fired asynchronously from the commit operation that sets the fields values. Can you try and fetch the item explictly from the list instead of using the Item from the workflow properties. something like the following:

SPListItem l_item = 
      workflowProperties.Item.List.Items.GetItemById(
                 workflowProperties.Item.Id
      );

i'm not certain, but it may be worth a try.

The other thing to keep in mind is the SPContext.Current object will be null if being called from an EventReceiver, but will be valid if called manually. It doesn't sound like this is the issue, but its something to be aware of nonetheless.