Column 'WSPublishState' does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.

This is a quick blog of something that troubled me for nearly an afternoon.

Scenario

• SP2013 workflow
• Packaged as Sandbox Solution with list definitions in Visual Studio

The errors happen during Feature activation.  Both from within Visual Studio's Deploy as well as via Site Settings - Activate Feature.  The feature activation fails because WSPublishState column doesn't exist.

Resolution

I fixed this by splitting the list definition and workflow definitions into different features.  This leads me to ponder if there is a conflict caused by the list, workflow and workflow association being created all within the same feature.