Management Pack Authoring Guide Complete!

The final section of the Management Pack Authoring Guide just went live! 

New Sections

This last section is called Presentation and covers Views and Linked Reports.  Views were something that most people had under control since the Operations Console provides a complete interface for creating and modifying.  Still, we wanted to provide some information on creating and editing them in the Authoring console which requires directly working with the XML.  We also have some guidance on what kinds of views to include in a typical management pack.

The other section is Linked Reports which is a topic that had minimal information available until now.  The Authoring console does provide some UI for working with linked reports, but it still requires working with some XML. We included the XML for each kind of report and described a process for using mostly copy/paste and a minimal amount of XML manipulation to create a linked report.  I’m also going to be creating a short video walking through creating a couple of linked reports that should make the process even more clear.

What’s Next?

The title of this post is not meant to be an implication that the Authoring Guide is frozen.  We are still open to making any corrections that we might identify or even add/change content based on feedback.  I’ve already rewritten a couple of sections based on comments that they weren’t clear.  Please continue to send mail to mpauthor@microsoft.com if you have any feedback along those lines. 

This also does not mark the end of our MP Authoring documentation.  The Authoring Guide is meant to include the basic concepts and processes required for management pack design and authoring but is not meant to document every scenario that you can implement based on those concepts.  We will continue to release documentation, videos, samples, etc for creating a variety of different scenarios.  As always, please continue to watch this blog and also our Twitter feed for any announcements along these lines.