FIM 2010: Event driven scheduling

Intro

In a previous post I described how I implemented a windows service for scheduling Forefront Identity Manager.

Since then, me and my colleagues used it in every FIM project. For one project I was asked if it was possible to trigger the synchronization "on demand". A specific trigger for a synchronization cycle for example, was the creation of a user in the FIM portal. After some brainstorming and Googling, we came up with a solution.

Trigger

We asked ourselves following question: "Is it possible to send a signal to our existing Windows service to start a synchronization cycle?". All the functionality for scheduling was already there, so it seemed reasonable to investigate and explore this option. As it turns out, it is possible to send a signal to a Windows service and the implementation turned out to be very simple (and simple is good, right?).