1dent1ty cHa0s

The tech reviewers completed the reviews of the updated ILM chapter and I've put the finishing touches on it myself and submitted it to the publisher. I see now that you can pre-order the book through Amazon and even O'Reilly's site is listing it as an estimated publication date of December 2008.
In the updated chapter on ILM 2007 is a primer on how the synchronization engine works followed by the list of recipes. Among the list of recipes are the following new recipes available only in the 3rd edition:

• Extending object types to include a new attribute
• Previewing changes to the ILM configuration
• Committing changes to individual identities using the Commit Preview feature
• Passing data between rules extensions using transaction properties
• Using a single rules extension to affect multiple attribute flows
• Flowing a null value to a data source
• Contributing a UTCCodedTime attribute in Active Directory
• Importing and decoding the accountExpires attribute
• Exporting and encoding the accountExpires attribute

It's too bad the ILM 2 beta wasn't farther along (beta 2 was out when I completed my first draft) or else we might have squeezed in a chapter on some of the new features available in the ILM Service Database (aka the Portal app).

Our colleague Paul Divan has begun breaking down the Workflow walkthrough in a series of blog posts - check it out!

Making .Net Concepts Work: How to Create a Custom ILM 2.0 Beta 3 Workflow Activity - Part I

Looks like the Image server is back online now - yay!  As you can see we also upgraded the blog to a dual-core x64 compliant system running Windows Vista. Nah, just kidding, that's just the laptop...

The server that hosts all of the images for this blog has been down for a number of days but it should return to service here within the next day or so as it transitions to a new data center and IP address. That means that at some point you may be either clearing your local DNS cache or waiting for the entries in your provider's DNS cache to timeout and pickup the new IP address.  I'll make another post once it is back up.

I do apologize for the inconvenience.

We have made the source code for the walkthrough and the diagnostic WF activity available on CodePlex as the ILM 2 Custom WF Activity project.  You can download both the code and documentation from there and we will look to expand the functionality of the Diagnostic Activity if there is interest.