An event wait pauses a workflow process in lieu of some event being raised. However, in many cases it is not desirable for a process to wait indefinitely. It is possible for a chain of events to occur that mean the event the process is waiting on may never be raised. For example, by chance the event could be raised before the process reaches the event wait activity. To mitigate against this risk it is possible to optionally specify a deadline for an event to be raised after which a deadline handler will be invoked.