First of all, I want to apologies for my English. If you notice something wrongly written or unclear, feel free to advise me so I can correct my post ( and learn ^^ ).
Why creating your own SCCM Console extension?
There can be multiple reasons to do so:
- you like challenges and this could be the next one.
- You require a feature that is not already built-in.
Many SCCM users will feel enough comfortable with the console as-is. I wasn’t!
Of course, there are also 3rd party extensions that you can download like the well-known RECAST Right Click Tools but I was still not fully satisfied with some of their implementations.
I.e. adding a lot of devices to a collection with a CSV file is not available natively in the console. Recast RCT brings this feature. It works well for few devices but as soon as you will need to feed it with a list of more than 500 devices (as we do in my company on some large deployments) you’ll see that it requires several hours to process. Furthermore, if you check status messages, you will notice that there is one for every single device making analysis a bit more complex and surely brings some overload to the infrastructure.
Moreover, I need to provide this tool to some other contributors and RECAST RCT brings a lot of other tools that were not necessary to them.
Why do I want to share my experience with all?
Creating your own SCCM console extension is less complicated than it seems but if you try to do it all alone, the first time, you might face a lot of small issues that can make this work painful.
I already built some console extension successfully so, even if I’m not a professional developer, I can, at least, try to make things easier for others.
I’m not trying to replace the documentation provided in the Configuration Manager SDK, but if you only rely on it, you will see that some details are missing especially regarding the permission aspect.
To follow this How-to, you need some basic knowledge about a few things.
This is not a programming course!
If you don’t know anything about WMI queries or C# language basics, you will probably be lost quickly. You will only be able to copy-paste lines of code you won’t understand.
You need to have minimal knowledge about:
- WMI / WMI query
- C#
- XML structure
If you don’t, it’s advisable to do some research on the internet before going any further. There are a lot of well-made tutorials on these subjects.
I’m sure you already know what an SCCM console extension is (if you’re not, why are you reading this 😉 )
It’s just a way to extend the available functionalities of the SCCM console to make your work more efficient.
All the SCCM console aspects and behaviors are described in some large XML files located in the installation folder. Modifying these files is, of course, not supported by Microsoft, but there is a simple way to create your own XML file that will be merged during the console startup.
So, to start, the only thing you need is a good text editor. Microsoft Notepad is an option but you will be much more comfortable with more powerful editors like Notepad++ (with the “XML Tools” plugin)
Let’s start creating a new menu entry in the console.