James Simmonds

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!

A couple of useful links that I have discovered recently that you might like... Google Public DNS - I updated my router and all is well...the internet is still "working" and it "feels" just that bit snappier...some comparitive testing with firebug/fiddler between my ISP DNS and Google is necessary to get a real idea of any performance improvement but using Google for DNS isn't all about improving resolution times . Evernote - A colleague showed my this the other day and I finally twigged that this wasn't Mac only - for some reason I though it was....anyway installed and impressed. If you need a multi computer scrap book then this has got to be a great place to start. You can also add content with your iPhone or WinMo device. CrashPlan - free for personal use (ad supported) backup service that supports mapped network drives ( kinda! workaround documented here ). I have a RAID1 NAS drive (bought after I lost all our photos from corrupted HDD -doh!) so I h...

...adding some major new features to DeploymentWang. First up is a configuration sub-system - key features are spreadsheet driven (building on LinqToExcel capability currently in DeploymentWang) and runtime updatable including across multiple applications and servers using distributed caching (will probably ship with plugins to Velocity & SharedCache); no more application restarts to pick up web/app.config changes, hooray! The second new feature will be an entire application health monitoring subsystem with a plugin architecture for writing custom health checks pertinent to your application. Maybe this will be in a new project, "MonitorWang"...we'll see. Both of these have come about from experience learnt during the successful delivery of my latest project, Tesco Entertainment

I have a Windows Eventlog. I have tens of thousands of entries hitting it. I need to find and report on a few of them that an app should insert each day. Step forward LogParser ..nothing new here, we're old acquaintances. The spotlight is reserved for Visual LogParser ...happy days :)

I've long been a fan (and sometime practitioner) of " Getting Things Done " (GTD) organisational approach. At the heart of being "organised" is having a good "todo" list...and for the last few months I've been using ToDo-ist to power my list. I'm also a recent convert to "the cloud" - using online applications and services...the availability and reach makes "cloud" based stuff just so useful....and Todo-ist also neatly ties these two things together...and the real plus is that ToDo-ist also has an iGoogle gadget/widget plugin. Usually I find a shiny new app/service/tool etc and post about it immediately only to find that it doesn't live up the hype or expectation - so this "recommendation" for ToDo-ist is based on several months of actually using it! I really like the level of flexibility ToDo-ist offers (it terms of list structures) and has some nice shortcuts too (like putting "tod" or "tom...

There has been a lot of noise recently about Inversion of Control (IoC) with .Net recently (stop sniggering at the back java guys!).... I've been using IoC via the Spring.NET framework for over 2 years now - it's a completely different approach to coding and once you get your head around it everything just falls into place and development is a real joy again. As I mention, Spring.NET is my framework of choice but a recent change in employer has seen me bump up against Castle/Windsor . First impressions are that I like it - it's not as powerful or feature rich as Spring but that's not always a bad thing! The one thing I did miss though was Visual Studio intellisense when editing the configurations - Spring has an online schema that can be associated with a Spring configuration. This got me thinking - if the VS intellisense can be hooked into that easily why not create one for Windsor configuration? So I did...you can download it from my new google code site here . Remem...

Just seen this productivity util from the Maxivista guys. PhraseExpress - http://www.phraseexpress.com/ Its a phrase/expression expansion tool that works in any application (not just msoffice) to expand any phrase/term into a full string... eg: you type bbfn and it is automatically expanded into bye bye for now Plus - its free for the personal use edition!