James Simmonds

Talk about information overload...and that's just to make a cuppa! Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo .

New release here What's new? Added a 24/7 scheduler - gives you fine control over scheduling your checks. You can set as many times during a day when you want it to run plus you can set "Weekend", "Weekdays" and "Everyday" times - these are additive so you can combine them with individual days, so if you want to run a check every 9am and 2pm Monday, 4pm Wednesday and 02:34:56 Friday - no problem, this scheduler has it covered. I've also started work on a dashboard application to view the monitoring data stored via the SQL publisher. So far the idea is this....create a MonitorWang activity which embeds a web server (using this ) that serves a simple html page with a Silverlight application in; I want to do more Silverlight so this is a really good opportunity. I'll keep you all updated via the discussion pages.

Ok, so a week on and I've added a couple of new features to MonitorWang . The big one is support for LogParser based checks (I kicked the idea about here ). You can interop into the LogParser COM object so I wrapped this with a bunch of checks - this means that you can write any LogParser query to count something (eg: IIS 404's, RSS feed mentioning a term, Eventlog errors) and have the result sent back (eg: 0 rows = failure, > 0 = success; this can also be reversed). This was a very quick win and dramatically increases the power of MonitorWang - may favourite check whilst testing this out was this query to the XML LogParser check....(MonitorWang automatically adds the SELECT COUNT(*) bit)... [SELECT COUNT(*)] FROM http://jimblogdog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default WHERE title2 LIKE '%monitorwang%' Yup - this check will fail until I blog something with MonitorWang in the title (too late!)...but how cool is that? If you aren't familiar with LogParser and you s...

I've just launched my latest in the " Wang " series of projects - MonitorWang ! Essentially its an Open Source windows service that runs plugins for performing "HealthChecks" and reporting the results to Sql, WCF, NServiceBus and even your iPhone via Growl. You can write plugins for your custom "checks" (eg: how many customers called "Smith" from Town XYZ have registered in the last 2 hours) and also plugins for scheduling them as well. I spent a fair bit of time on the docs so I won't reguritate it all here - head over to the Codeplex site to find out more. Enjoy!

" Making it up so you don't have to " I've worked in the digital entertainment industry for a while now and in my experience this would pretty much save you a shed load of time if you have missed the social media boat and are playing catchup. BTW: Hugo, how is DDS?