Enterprise Library Management Extensions

Patterns and Practices have recently released the extensions to enterprise library that provide both WMI and Group Policy support. https://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=295a464a-6072-4e25-94e2-91be63527327

For WMI see https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/wmi_start_page.asp

For Group Policy see https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/grouppolicy/default.mspx 

WMI at the moment is read-only, following the WMI support in the .net framework, however the Group Policy is fully implemented and rocks.

What does Group Policy support mean?

Group Policy allows administrators to define configuration settings (a policy) that can be applied to users or computers within active directory. These settings can be anything from configuring the desktop behavior to specifying the application logging level. For example an administrator can hide the RUN command from the Start Menu on every single computer in the enterprise using group policy. Policy settings are delivered via Active Directory to computers, where they are stored in the Registry. For an application to support group policy, a policy setting must be defined by an administrator, and the application must be written to check the policy settings in the registry to see if any policies have been defined for that application.

Enterprise Library provides group policy support by implementing an extension that can read these policy settings from the registry. If there is a setting defined for that particular application, Enterprise Library will use the setting from the registry and not the one found in the xml configuration file. This allows administrators to configure any Enterprise Library configuration setting via Group Policy and apply it to the application regardless of which users or computers the application is deployed to.

Why Group Policy your application? Suppose you are using enterprise library. Let’s say you are using the logging application block and want to reconfigure logging for a desktop application that has been deployed to 30 computers. You could write (then test) a script that would make those changes, or you could instead use Group Policy to make the change across all 30 computers. (or indeed 30,000)

See a quick demo of the extensions at https://channel9.msdn.com/shows/The_DFO_Show 

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