Rob Gillen's WebLog

Wow… early this morning was the first time that I was really able to spend some time with the new Visual Studio 2005 beta… and let me join the majority of the blogsphere in saying that I’m quite impressed.  My task today was a simple one… that of converting a primarily content-focused website that I had build using Dreamweaver MX to ASP.NET 2.0.  The following are some general impressions…

One of the unfortunate realities of being a busy consultant and developer is that your exposure to technologies and tools are often limited to what you have to have to use to get your job done, or what your client needs and/or is interested in.  Obviously, you work hard to keep yourself exposed to as much and varied technology as possible, however somethings invaribly slip through the cracks.

I was recently contacted by a client inquiring how to forward a user's mail using MPS.  There is no specific "provider method" for this, but it is actually very easy using the Manged Active Directory::ModifyUser method. 

As a member of the development community, it seems almost requsite to comment on the newly-released Visual Studio 2005 beta 1 products.  I learned of the release while on client site participating in a discovery project for a MPS rollout.  One of the things the client was concered about was the ability to "drive" the provisioning sytem from their current *nix-based SOP system.  We had been talking about the web services interface as the most probably interface candidate.  During the meeting I was able to download and install the Visual Web Developer 2005 beta 1, and within a matter of minutes build a web service example on the fly and demonstrate to the customer how his existing systems could call the methods and interact with MPS (I happened to be running a copy of the MPF engine on my laptop making the demonstration complete).  Needless to say, it was easy to keep their attention after such an easy and quick example.

Well, I'm about a week behind writing this post due to travelling around the world abit on business, but last weekend (June 24-25) represented the anual MIIS Users Group meeting on Microsoft's campus in Redmond.  I'm not sure what the official numbers were, but it seemed that there was a good group of users from around the world present for the two days of meetings.  During this time we were able to meet some of the MIIS team members as well as be introduced to where the product is going both in the short and longer term.

I'm continuing to work on a .NET version of the DAC (Delegated Administration Console) - essentially a UI front-end for the Microsoft provisioning System and specifically Hosted Exchange 2003.1... i've been learning a number of things and experimenting with some very interesting (at least to me) technologies.  I thought I'd share a little here and maybe post some more detail on each of these items over the next couple of weeks...

So I've been working on a test of the .NET globalization/localization techniques for ASP.NET (v1.1) and have been having relatively mixed results.  The documentation and step-by-step examples have been a bit weak and the documentation for this area of the framework does not seem nearly as robust as other topics. This perception might be, however, just from my lack of true understanding of how this is all supposed to work and the associated terminology.