A quick post to help anyone else that is using the SharePoint CreateTaskWithContentType or CreateTask workflow activity in their workflows or composite activities and get the following error in the ULS after starting the workflow via custom code:

“Item does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.” with the error code 72ew and category “Workflow Infrastructure“.

The error reported through the UI in the list or library where the workflow was running is simply Error Occurred, so not very helpful.
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If you’ve created your own workflow activities for SharePoint and want to make the deployment process as simple as possible, one thing you’ll need to do is automate the updating of Authorized Types in the configuration files for the farm.

This thankfully is fairly straight forward and helps to remove a manual step from your deployment process.

Best practice here is to create a feature to deploy the workflow that uses your new activities. Or, if you aren’t creating a workflow, I recommend you deploy the actions file (for SharePoint designer) in a solution. Just for reference, the actions file should be deployed to the templates\[language code]\workflow folder. Whichever way you decide to deploy, you’ll need to create a feature and receiver, as it’s the FeatureActivated method that we’ll use to update the web config files in the farm.
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