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First impressions on MDT Web FrontEnd Version 2

Roughly a year after the first public Beta and half a year after the initial release of Version 1 a new version of the MDT Web FrontEnd is getting closer. The new version will overcome a couple limitations of the first version plus it will get a whole bunch of new features. It’s still some work to do but I hope to have the first public Beta available at TechEd Europe 2010 . If you would like to support me on this project please read the bottom of this post. As an appetizer here are some first impressions...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, MDT, Frontend, TechEd

Add logging to your applications. NLog for beginners.

One of the most important aspects of your applications and scripts (beside their actual purpose)  is to log information about the currently running actions. On daily usage it might be useful to just verify if everything is working OK, or to have some kind of reporting based on this (logparser is quite helpful for such tasks). But as soon as a problem arises, this information is of huge importance to troubleshoot the current problem. So actually you can’t log to much, only to less. Logging in...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Frontend, Development

Has been a while …

since my last post. And I just wanted to take the opportunity to send a quick “ I’m still alive ” and give an overview of what is going to happen in the next time. In the last two posts ( VCS - Part 1 , VCS - Part 2 ) I wrote about Version\Revision Control Systems in general and how they could be of use, even for scripting or administrative purposes (yes, one article is still waiting to be published ;-) ). As not being a professional developer those typical developer tools are sometimes still new...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Active Directory, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend, Development

PrettyGoodFrontEndClone

I’ve always been a big fan of the PrettyGoodFrontEnd written by Johan Arwidmark . Originally written as a FrontEnd for ZTI deployments on SMS with BDD 2007 it has recently been updated for ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 Deployments with MDT 2010 integration. Similar to the Custom Boot Wizard I’ve mentioned already a couple times on this blog, Johan is now also using webservices to query the necessary information from MDT, Active Directory and ConfigMgr (SCCM). For this he wrote his own webservice reduced...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Custom Scripts, Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend

MDT Web FrontEnd – How To handle Custom Settings/Properties

In the last post I showed you how you can create custom Groups of settings, making it possible to give different Users a different amount of available and changeable information. In this post, I will show you some more advanced features of the MDT Web FrontEnd as it is able to handle custom settings the same way as handling the MDT built-in settings. MDT gives us a lot of possibilities right out of the box. But often you reach a point in your Deployment, where the built-in methods, scripts and properties...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend, MDT 2010, How To

Using a custom Boot wizard to boot known and unknown computers in SCCM and choose a Task Sequence to run – Step by Step

In some recent posts I wrote about how to create a custom boot wizard. During these posts I used an example which would be able to boot any known and unknown computer from SCCM, reads a list of available Collections having an OSD Task Sequence advertised to choose from, then drop the computer into one of these collections on the fly and wait until the Advertisement would be available for the computer before handing over to the Task Sequence engine which would then query the SCCM Server for an advertised...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, Microsoft Deployment, SCCM, Boot Wizard, MDT, Frontend

Webservice Update and First Impressions on a Web Frontend

It has been some time since my last post and this one is also more an announcement. Even if not writing much on this blog I haven't been lazy (OK, a bit lazy but not that much :-) ) and updated my Webservice. Troubleshooting has always been one of the biggest problems with the webservice. If something failed for whatever reason it was hard to identify as the webservice itself was not able to respond with an error message. Internally it raised some debug traces but this is not really handy. So...  ... Read the full post or  be the first to comment. Filed under: Webservice, MDT, Frontend