7 years of blogging about Operations Manager – wow!

I was looking at referrer statistics for this blog, and noticed that many people still arrive here by clicking on a link in the very last blog post from my previous Microsoft Technet blog. It’s been a while since I’ve visited the old blog, but I do actually still refer to it from time to time – and looking at the archive list I noticed that I am coming up on a 7 year anniversary.

That’s right – I cannot believe I’ve been blogging about Operations Manager since December, 2007!

My very first blog post was about a bug in the UI that didn’t add a reference to the management pack. LOL – it can be fun looking back on history sometimes! I get a sense of satisfaction that I have contributed so much to the Operations Manager community – through my blogs, the Technet forums, the Unleashed book, my projects site, etc…

I encourage you all to share your knowledge in your own way, because this body of work is quite literally the first knowledge base anyone will check before pioneering there own solution.

 

🙂

Create a class – visual studio authoring extensions (vsae)

In this post, I want to demonstrate how easy it is to create a class using Visual Studio Authoring Extensions. This is in response to some blog posts out there (like this one and this one) that describe this task as “difficult” outside of a 3rd party tool. It’s actually extremely easy!

Let’s take a look at how easy it is to create a class using VSAE.

<TypeDefinitions> 
<EntityTypes>
<ClassTypes>
<ClassType ID="ToolAndDie.Class.Computer" Abstract="false" Accessibility="Public" Base="Windows!Microsoft.Windows.ComputerRole" Hosted="true" Singleton="false" />
</ClassTypes>
</EntityTypes>
</TypeDefinitions>

Yep – it’s really that easy to create a class. Now all you need to do is discover it, and it’s actually just as easy to do that, especially if you’re using the registry.

My suggestion is, if you are new to authoring management packs, just take the leap into VSAE. There is no benefit in using 3rd party tools, like MP Author by Silect. I say that because, you’re not really picking up a new skillset by using these types of UI tools – however, you do pickup a new skillset that can be useful in other areas of your job by learning the language (XML).

There is a learning curve to everything – make the wise choice for your career.