A New Year, A New Itinerary: Intro to Blog Q1 CY2009

Welcome back from the winter hiatus.  I hope that you had a relaxing winter holiday season.  We return with a new itinerary to take us through the first quarter of calendar year 2009.  This itinerary includes specific requests from customers and focuses on broader aspects than the web service interface.  For example, we will cover changing email templates in the UI, adding custom workflows, and sync engine configuration.

This quarter will feature an update to the public resource management client that is compatible with the RTM bits of ILM “2”.  We will announce its timeline and availability when appropriate.

Different than the previous itinerary that scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday, this quarter I only am scheduling blog posts on Thursdays.  The reason is to be honest about our upcoming workload with releasing ILM “2”.  As always, keep the feedback coming.

We will cover these topics in Quarter 1:

  1. Jan 8: Introduction to Quarter 1 (this post)
  2. Jan 15: Customizing email templates
  3. Jan 22: Getting and updating objects in a particular locale
  4. Jan 29: Selecting attributes to return in an enumeration
  5. Feb 5: Reporting using XPath: Fundaments
  6. Feb 12: Reporting using XPath: My Pending Approvals
  7. Feb 19: Reporting using XPath: Auditing Request Objects
  8. Feb 26: Approving requests programmatically
  9. Mar 5: Sync config: Fundamentals of ma-data and mv-data
  10. Mar 12: Sync config: Updating the SQL MA
  11. Mar 19: Adding a custom AuthZ workflow
  12. Mar 26: Adding a custom Action workflow
  13. Apr 2: Quarter 2 Intro

A major difference I’d like to call out:

  1. I now refer to blog posts in code samples on MSDN Code Gallery using a different convention.
  2. The new format is 2009Q1TopicX where 2009Q1 refers to this itinerary in Q1 of 2009 and X is the blog post number.
  3. Blog post numbers match the number from the published itinerary, above.
  4. This post is 1, so any code associated would be 2009Q1Topic1.
  5. Post 13 is part of q2 so we would refer to it as 2009Q2Topic1.  I include it on this itinerary to give you a heads up.

A couple minor differences I’d like to call out:

  1. I placed the date first to emphasize this blog has a scheduled itinerary.
  2. I changed the date format to use month abbreviation and numeric day.  The purpose is to align with proper globalization of dates.  In the previous blog I used shorthand American date format (month/day) without considering our friends in Europe.  I hope it is more clear for you.