Upgrading a C# plug-in to Intel® vPro™ Platform Solution Manager 2.0.0.12

Sometime ago I wrote a post titled "Developing a C# Plugin for The Intel® vPro™ Platform Solution Manager" -PSM-. Everything in that post is still relevant. The goal of this post is updating the source code to make it work with the latest version of PSM. In that time I wanted to share the different aspects to consider when writing a component for the PSM. Back then (01/20/2014) PSM extension points were provided via a base WPF control and base (abstract) class. In other words, you needed to create a custom WPF control extending from Intel.Ucrd.SolutionManagerAPI.ctrlWPFBase as seen in the following code snippet.

    public partial class ctrlAgentMonitor : ctrlWPFBase
    {
        //...
    }

Other tasks related with the WPF control (e.g.: adding UI elements via XAML, adding functionality via code behind) had nothing special except by the method Loaded which was useful to load run your code. The second major part of building a plug-in was related with the control's life cycle management. This management was possible thanks to the class Intel.Ucrd.SolutionManagerAPI.SolutionManagerPlugin. By extending from that class you could handle the creation of the control and set different properties as illustrated in the following code snippet.

    public class AgentMonitor_Impl : SolutionManagerPlugin
    {
        //..

        public override SolutionManagerPlugin CreateInstance()
        {
            return new AgentMonitor_Impl();
        }
    }

After that introduction, the next step is getting the project to compile in the latest version of PSM, which is 2.0.0.12 (link to download here) - 03/30/2015. Then you can compile the new source files to get the binaries that will be referenced from your projects. The main library to reference is SolutionManagerAPI.dll. You won't need SolutionManagerWPF.dll unless you plan re-use some of the WPF forms used by PSM.

The last step is compiling your project. This should work since the new and updated changes are backward compatible, so you can start using the new functionalities of PSM like the "Upload list of systems", displayed below. Finally copy/paste the library in the PSM bin folder and run your plug-in.