A savvy student in a SharePoint 2010 class today asked about event handlers and Designer workflows.  As I am wont to do, I just “did it” to see exactly what happened.

When having a Designer workflow (associated with a list) kick off automatically, an ItemAdded and ItemUpdated event handler are attached to the list in question to handle said kickoff.  If you want to have some code run via event handler before the workflow starts, your best bet is to use ItemAdding, as ItemAdded won’t be guaranteed to run before the workflow starts.

This is one of those cases where the term “asynchronous” with regard to the ItemAdded event handler can be taken to mean what the actual word means, instead of as a substitute for “after.”