R – Sequential Workflow Library on SharePoint

Essentially SharePoint is a hosting engine for Windows Workflow Foundation. There are some elements that you need to include when developing a WWF workflow that you require to run on the SharePoint workflow engine but you could build these into your project as you know that this workflow will be ported to SharePoint at some point.

However, by the time you have implemented the UI components to allow your workflow to operate (forms etc.), and the engine to run it in you might as well have just deployed it all with a minimal WSS 3.0 installation.

My advice, design your WWF workflow in Visual Studio to run within the SharePoint workflow engine and take advantage of the infrastruture that comes with it. Otherwise you will spend additional weeks on your complaints project that will soon become redundant when you port over to SharePoint.

A good overview article can be found here.

Which version of VS are you using? I'm running VS2008 Team Suite (SP1), and I get all 8 templates mentioned. Perhaps try a re-install on a virtual machine, to see if it was an install failure?