Guide to creating your own ConfigMgr tools – Part 2 Extended

In the following series of blog posts I will introduce you to C#, Visual Studio and the ConfigMgr SDK, and show you how to produce your own custom tooling easily.

The motivation behind this series of postings is to enable you to create community tools or bespoke tooling to assist you in your day-to-day ConfigMgr role, and thus to enhance the Community overall, as hopefully you’ll produce the very next best tool and we’ll all benefit from it.

To underpin the guide I’ve written a tool called MonitorMP which will keep an eye on the health of your Management Points outside of the ConfigMgr Console, the source code for this tool will be built up and completed by the time we’ve finished with the series of posts, at which point we’ll make the tool made available in both compiled and source code form and everyone that read this guide will feel somehow connected to it :)

Previous postings for this guide

Guide to creating your own ConfigMgr tools – Part 1

Guide to creating your own ConfigMgr tools – Part 2

I’ve extended Part 2 because I wanted to throw in some info on setting up the Help system in Visual Studio 2013, it reduces round trips from the browser when trying to figure something out, but it still doesn’t entirely remove the need to go out to search engines so as to find good examples to learn from.

Go ahead and open Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop, and from the menu bar click Help and select Add and Remove Help Content:

Once you launch into Add and Remove Help Content you’ll be presented with a tree representation of the available help modules:

The key ones for us to download and which are selected already in the shot above are:

1. .Net Framework 4.5
2. Visual Studio 2013: Fundamentals
3. Visual Studio 2013: Visual Basic and Visual C#
4. Help Viewer 2.1
5. Desktop Development
6. Windows Debugging

The first two are added automatically, the remaining 4 I chose, help for the C# language, an update for the help system and helpful information on Desktop Development and Windows Debugging, always handy.

Make a note that the help files are being stored on the C: drive, move them to another volume if desired, this can be done before or after downloading the modules

You’ll notice that by default several help modules have already been installed, these and all newly added modules can be managed over time by clicking Update so as to get the latest content.

Now go and click Update to begin downloading new and updating old documentation:

The .Net update is quite large, so this will take a bit of time, you can track the progress in the status bar at the bottom of the updater:

After the process has settled down, you’ll notice that the help system on the left hand side has new updated content showing:

You can search the help system for keywords around what you want to learn about or do, and you should find technical MSDN information and good usage examples immediately without leaving the IDE:

In the above shot I’ve searched for Console.WriteLine and have a bunch of results showing on the right hand side.

When you’re trying to piece something together I have the IDE and the Help system Windows setup like this:

This should really help you as you move forwards with your skills, I use to have to do this by hand with reference books, such as this one:

By Stefan Dittrich

Not that searchable, hehe, mostly remembered where things were to save time, I still have these books and they have been thumbed so much they started falling apart, kind of puts how useful Help Viewer is into perspective :-)

Next posting for this guide

Guide to creating your own ConfigMgr tools - Part 3