While not promising anything set in stone just yet, Microsoft revealed that it was investigating the possibility of delivering a .NET Framework class library for DHCP Server management. An integral part of the company's effort in this sense is a survey designed to help gather feedback on DHCP Server Management APIs. The last question of the survey is “Do you see yourself using .NET Framework class library for DHCP Server management if available?”

“The DHCP team is investigating the design of a .NET framework class library that our administrators can use to automate their DHCP server management operations. We would like to get input from the DHCP administrators on key issues, faced with DHCP server management. Your feedback will be valuable to this effort. Please take a few minutes of your valuable time to fill out the online survey. Please specify scenarios/ use cases in detail to help us understand your requirement clearly. Expected time to fill out the survey is 5-10 minutes,” revealed Raunak Pandya, DHCP Server Team.

The first eight questions are designed to give Microsoft an idea of what DHCP administrators have to deal with on a daily basis, from the volume of DHCP servers, to that of nodes and desktops getting IP addresses served to them. Then the company offers respondents a chance to get down to business. The next few inquiries allow for extensive input to be provided.

Here are the questions from Microsoft: “Please list down the specific pain-points/ problems that have been resolved in your environment, which have been addressed using netsh/ in-house or third party tools. Is there any functionality or internal process (related to DHCP), that you would like to automate, but encountered difficulty, in automating using Win32/ netsh commands? What are the common DHCP Server operations, that you would like to automate/ access via the .NET Framework class library? Please list use cases which are not so common but you consider them good to have and will make the .NET Framework class library powerful.”