Intel(r) AMT Developers: What tools are you using?

[Andrew_S_Intel2]

Continuing Gael's trend from last week, I'm asking a new question this week.

While developing for AMT, what toolshave you found the most useful? The SDK, DTK, something else entirely from the vPro Expert Center?

I'll also be popping up in this thread occasionally throughout the week with other interesting resources or tools that I've found.

[jacace]

Quoting - Andrew Schiestl (Intel)

Continuing Gael's trend from last week, I'm asking a new question this week.

While developing for AMT, what toolshave you found the most useful? The SDK, DTK, something else entirely from the vPro Expert Center?

I'll also be popping up in this thread occasionally throughout the week with other interesting resources or tools that I've found.

The DTKhas beenthe most useful tool for me, but I think that it depends on what you're developing, maybe somebody can found most useful the SDK or only the redirection library.

[Gael_H_Intel]

Javier, what do you think the SDK needs in order to be more useful?

[jacace]

Quoting - Gael Holmes (Intel)

Javier, what do you think the SDK needs in order to be more useful?

Hello Gael!


Wow, that's a very compromising question.
OK, let me start by telling that it's easy to talk about something already done (you know, it's easier to talk than to do) and that I do appreciate and respect the huge efforts that all of you guys do in order to make technology more accessible.

I think the answer is: more useful documentation.

For example:

1-The SDK has amazing documents, but when you get them you see about 15 PDF files and you have no idea what's the starting point. These documents are not easy to navigate.

2-The SCS has wonderful guides but theyre organized in a confusing way because its easy to get lost while reading. Here we had to create some documents to give to our customers, so I started to translate them but I quickly found out that the chapters can be re-organized to avoid a hard navigation (like appendix round trips) and that flow diagrams can be included.

3-I think the DTK it's the main entrance for many users and has some opportunities to improve. For example: some users would like using the SDK's C++ interfaces, other users would like using the high level components (C#), other users would like using the whole DTK as a base API, others users would like to integrate some of the DTK's tools and other users would like to integrate the SCS as a complete solution; but now all the documentation is mixed up so you need covering it completely in order to find out your own road map.

Part of the solutioncould be some navigation trees, some HOW-TOs, some well segmented-content and a higher community support (for example, I read some days ago a question about somebody who asks about an emulator; that can be a perfect project that some community rangers can continue).

Thanks a lot for your question,

=)

Javier Andrs

[Gael_H_Intel]

Quoting - javierandrescaceres

Hello Gael!


Wow, that's a very compromising question.
OK, let me start by telling that it's easy to talk about something already done (you know, it's easier to talk than to do) and that I do appreciate and respect the huge efforts that all of you guys do in order to make technology more accessible.

I think the answer is: more useful documentation.

For example:

1-The SDK has amazing documents, but when you get them you see about 15 PDF files and you have no idea what's the starting point. These documents are not easy to navigate.

2-The SCS has wonderful guides but theyre organized in a confusing way because its easy to get lost while reading. Here we had to create some documents to give to our customers, so I started to translate them but I quickly found out that the chapters can be re-organized to avoid a hard navigation (like appendix round trips) and that flow diagrams can be included.

3-I think the DTK it's the main entrance for many users and has some opportunities to improve. For example: some users would like using the SDK's C++ interfaces, other users would like using the high level components (C#), other users would like using the whole DTK as a base API, others users would like to integrate some of the DTK's tools and other users would like to integrate the SCS as a complete solution; but now all the documentation is mixed up so you need covering it completely in order to find out your own road map.

Part of the solutioncould be some navigation trees, some HOW-TOs, some well segmented-content and a higher community support (for example, I read some days ago a question about somebody who asks about an emulator; that can be a perfect project that some community rangers can continue).

Thanks a lot for your question,

=)

Javier Andrs

Great Feedback Javier! Are you suggesting creating a community project where our AMT Developers create an emulator? I think that would be really neat. I'm guessing that we would have to release source code for it (from the old version as a starting point.) But then I'm thinking that source code may have proprietary info and so maybe not so doable.
--Gael

[Andrew_S_Intel2]

Quoting - Gael Holmes (Intel)

Great Feedback Javier! Are you suggesting creating a community project where our AMT Developers create an emulator? I think that would be really neat. I'm guessing that we would have to release source code for it (from the old version as a starting point.) But then I'm thinking that source code may have proprietary info and so maybe not so doable.
--Gael

Per my initial note, I'm popping back in with some additional resources/ tools that people might not be aware of.

In the SDK, as Javier noted the amount of documentation can be overwhelming to someone who is just getting started. Two resources in the Docs folder that I was not originally aware of are the index.html file and the search.pdx file. The index.html contains links to all of the pdfs in this folder, and helps both structure them by category and points to which documents to look at first. The search.pdx fileallows you to perform a text search through all of the pdf's simultaneously, which is useful for discovering all mentions of a given feature throughout the documentation.

On the tool side, I'm not sure of the list of tools on the vPro Expert center hasbeen mentionedin our forumsbefore, it's at: http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-1171#Remote_Control_Utility, it can be reached from the main page on the vPro expert center by looking for "Free tool downloads". Although the primary focus for these tools areusing vPro instead of creating software to use vPro, there are still severalbundles that can be useful here. One tool I'd like to point out is the AMT Packet Decoder. When debugging AMT issues I'm having, I'll occasionally use a traffic analyzer (such as Wireshark) to look at the exact AMT commands that were sent from and to the AMT system. The AMT Packet Decoder serves much the same function, but only captures the AMT packets instead of all traffic. It also formats those packets into a more readable form. This makes it easier to look at exactly what commands were sent, which can be helpful for debugging issues when creating code to access AMT.

[Gael_H_Intel]

Would anyone like to have this thread re-capped in a Blog (to keep it from eventually getting buried?) Does anyone read our Blogs?

[Ajay_M_Intel]

Quoting - Gael Holmes (Intel)

Would anyone like to have this thread re-capped in a Blog (to keep it from eventually getting buried?) Does anyone read our Blogs?

I think summarizing the output into a blog post is an excellent idea.

[Gael_H_Intel]

I should go back and do that with the question I posted too. Yes. I will do that.