Sadly at some point this month June 2020 the TechNet Gallery will be wound down, after a ten-year stint as a watering hole for systems management tooling, guides and source code:
Looking back TechNet Gallery ended up playing a healthy part over the last decade in maintaining the cohesion of scripts, tools, utilities and guides centered around Microsoft systems management, especially ConfigMgr, by acting as a water-holing. Change is upon us once again.
The retirement announcement page states:
With the assent of GitHub, the position TechNet Gallery occupied became a little hazy, it makes sense to switch to GitHub. To continue, developers have already or are going to have to publish their tooling’s source code on GitHub as projects, as suggested here:
A fair amount of the TechNet Gallery’s content consists of compiled tooling without source code present, the developers that are bothered will have already setup their GitHub projects to house their tools, scripts or utilities, as it says the guides on TechNet will need to be moved to alternate web services, and the rest of the content sadly will disappear into the ether once they turn the Gallery off. I hope that they keep the Gallery in read-only mode and archive it off rather than black-holing the entire lot.
I enjoyed using the TechNet Gallery to host my content over the last 6 years or so. Made things simple at the time. In later years I started publishing the source code for my tooling on GitHub, so those tools will survive out there for now. This retirement will spur me on to see what source code I haven’t published to GitHub to round things off.
I had a little chuckle when seeing that I have published 17 projects to the TechNet Gallery, I remember each of them, some more clearly than than others, and here’s all 17 sorted by downloads:
In England I’ve visited customer sites and seen some of this tooling present on their ConfigMgr servers or infrastructure, friends have told me how they have used some of it when onsite doing consultancy work, so I know that it was useful to others, and most of the tools were written so I could get something done on the job myself, so overall it was all worth it.
The top three (3) tools by download are:
ConfigMgr Inbox Monitor @ 7,596
Did you know you … that Inbox Monitor has a big-brother called Inbox Watchdog. I tried to turn it into a commercial systems diagnostics tool but ran out of steam. I kept the project private as it isn’t really designed for public use, it was pretty complex and after a period of time of non-use even I’d forgotten how to operate the thing fully when I came to show it to a friend. I had another tool I tried to make into a commercial tool called LocationAware, that was before MP’s and SUP’s were boundary-aware! Back in the day!
System Center Store @ 5,979
* Great logo! Community contributions!
I let System Center Store updates slip to the wayside after a year of keeping it going, there were alternatives around and I couldn’t find enough time to curate the manifest regularly, the advertisers from the ConfigMgr ISV community had their time on it so I let it go. I had grand plans for the tool, was going to turn it into a web-service and give it a nice front-end, I began coding out in that direction but it didn’t go anywhere. The store should still run, but I suspect the content its pointing at is out-dated somewhat.
LogLauncher @ 5,946
LogLauncher is my favourite out of all my tooling. I use it to this day in my labs and everywhere I go. The tool deserves some serious downloading, in the ten’s of thousands but it only got as far as just under 6k on TechNet Gallery. I don’t think anyone checks it out on GitHub.
There are other tools worth talking about, like PatchMaster which came in my opinion 5 years too late to have a good crack at the whip, but I really enjoyed coding the tool. Nowadays I would recommend looking at standardising patching by using ADR’s instead, even though PatchMaster can do the same job recent ADR developments make it easier to switch back to native tooling, which is my preference: