We announced Visual Studio Authoring Extensions back at MMS last April, and it’s now become our standard tool for building complex management packs. While we provided some basic documentation for VSAE, we’ve been lacking in a collection of exercises for building a variety of monitoring scenarios. In an effort to rectify that, we have posted a collection of new exercises in the Management Pack Authoring Guide on the TechNet Wiki. These are the same exercises that were published in the Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Authoring Guide, but they have been updated to include VSAE in addition to the existing Authoring Console example. Just the exercises for building a Service Model (classes and discoveries) and a Health Model (monitors and rules) are available at the moment, but we will be getting the Presentation and Composition exercises updated as well.
In addition to the updated exercises, we have a collection of the completed management pack and Visual Studio project in the TechNet Gallery for you to download. There is a separate download for Service Model and Health Model. This allows you to have a look at what the completed exercise should look like and help troubleshoot any issues with your own work.
There are some other topics that we need to cover for VSAE such as how to create a management pack bundle and how to work with resources such as images. That content will be coming shortly.
Please also keep in mind, that this is a wiki. If you see any issues with our exercises or content, or if you think that you can augment them with some better content, then please go ahead and do that. As always, please send a mail to MPAuthor@microsoft.com if you have any questions or concerns. If there is any management pack authoring topic that you feel we have not addressed properly, then we want to know.