1dent1ty cHa0s

Well, we made it through the gauntlet today and got all of the VMs deployed without incident. I owe thanks to Kevin James and Chris Calderon for helping out on the Hyper-V and PowerShell side of the house. Chris single handedly deployed all of our VMs with a little scripting magic while our SQL guru David Lundell built our SQL restoration scripts to aide our delegates in moving between the labs smoothly; no Hyper-V snapshots here, just SQL backups of the MSILM database in various states!

Tomorrow we will lend our moral support to what I’m sure will be a stellar exposition on ADFS by OCG’s Laura Hunter during the morning pre-con workshop. Our session will follow after lunch!

Laura wouldn’t talk to me until she got through the final two parts of the Battlestar Gallactica finale (best Sci-Fi ending ever!) so we watched that on the projector while the VMs were deploying.

If you haven’t already signed up for our pre-con workshop then for shame! We are putting the finishing touches on it now and I can tell you that its chocked full of goodies. Joe Zamora is leaving source code for three custom workflows on the box:

• Generate OID Activity – demonstrates how to use the public web service client published by Joe Schulman to query for objects and then use the UpdateResource activity
• Update Attribute Activity – our replacement for the Function Evaluator which lets you do the basic stuff you need against //Target including date math! More examples of using the UpdateResource building block activity.
• Owner Rollup Activity – very cool, not only does this demonstrate binding the FilterBuilder control in your workflow but does some nice recursion to enforce that the value of a specified reference attribute meets the criteria in the filter.

We will be extending ILM “2” and demonstrating how to leverage the request framework to build your own applications so that they can not only take advantage of basic approvals but lifecycle management as well.

What are you waiting for, register now!

I’ve been doing quite a lot of hyping of the work that Joe Zamora has done with our WF activities for ILM 2 and we’ve received very positive feedback. We’ve also received quite a bit of feedback requesting code and examples for one of our activities that uses the FilterBuilder control inside of the WF. This requires some special wiring of the ActivitySettingsPart which Joe goes into more detail here – very cool stuff so check it out!

CShark: Add a FilterBuilder Control to an ActivitySettingsPart - Part 1

So, another one of our super-devs, Rebecca Croft, went and started a blog (Apollo Jack) without telling me thinking she could remain under the radar. :)  Rebecca and I are currently working an ILM project together so I’ll probably twist her arm a bit for some more ILM posts.

Check out her deep dive on what Join rule extensions are doing under the hood in SQL!

Apollo Jack: Hit or MIIS

MVP "I'm a PC" Video

I had an incredible time at this year’s MVP Summit – see for yourself!