James Simmonds

[Update 19th Apr 2012]  - mission complete!...v2.4.0 of Wolfpack has been released and this includes a new set of plugins that can automatically download a NuGet package then execute a deployment tool (eg: DropkicK, MSBuild.exe) - it can even run NUnit tests (via the console runner). Wolfpack v2.4.0 Wolfpack.Contrib.Deployment [Original Post] Another day, another project and deployment raises its head... Thinking that this problem must have been cracked by now I had a look around the .Net landscape and found two interesting solutions. Octopus Deploy - a .Net convention based deployment system using NuGet packages, loosely based on AppHarbour's approach. DropkicK (aka DK) - another awesome initiative from Dru Sellers et al. I like the simplicity of Octopus but also like DK's  fluent code based deployment. Hmmm, this has got me thinking - Wolfpack could easily be adapted to be used as a deployment agent. Wolfpack can already monitor a NuGet feed for new pac...

Hurrah! Version 2.1 of Wolfpack (formally MonitorWang) is released! This release is all about " Build Analytics " - a new set of plugins allow you to monitor the state of a TeamCity build configuration and then once this is complete it can extract stats from any* build tool run as part of it. * When I say any I mean it supports NCover, SpecFlow, StoryQ reports but as usual with Wolfpack it is easy to create your own parsers to extract from any tool you might use, eg: NDepends, FxCop. It is also simple to extend it to cover other build systems like TFS, CruiseControl. The final piece of the puzzle of to visualise this information and the Wolfpack Geckoboard Data Service does a great job of this - it allows you to display these stats directly in your Geckoboard .

I've observed an interesting trend from my download statistics on my main open source project, MonitorWang ...that downloads often increase on a Friday. What can we infer from this? Developers have some down time to look at "other" stuff on Friday? Interesting to know how official this is or just people getting bored with the humdrum stuff and looking for something interesting to do at the end of the week? MonitorWang's official birthday is 8th August when I first uploaded it to codeplex however it was in conception & development way before that so it's almost a year old. It's racked up over 1000 downloads and I've got some big plans for it to be revealed shortly. More importantly I'm starting to get feedback and success stories of it in use which is the icing on the cake - 1000 downloads means nothing if it's not of value to someone! Thanks to everyone that has helped shape & contribute to it, in particular Rob Gibbens and David St...

It's taken a while to get this one out - mainly due to a combination of sunny weather and a series of Bank Holidays (and the odd beer festival!). MonitorWang v1.0.8 is released! This is a big release - several bug fixes and rebuilds against the latest 3rd party libraries, Magnum, TopShelf and NServiceBus plus a major new feature - AppStats  (all the details here including the Etsy inspiration behind it). Comments and feedback welcome (via the codeplex discussions page)

Podio  - currently being wowed by this web application. It's a highly customisable collaborative "space" for your team to manage there activities. Essentially you create a "space" then populate it with the apps (widgets) that have the greatest affinity with what your "space" is about. So if you were collaborating on a new website then you will use apps from the software development pack (suite of apps) but you can mix and match apps from any category to provide a completely customised environment to manage your work & team with. This concept is excellent as I've used many "management" type sites, must notably (and well known) being Basecamp and found it good but not great - its suitability & popularity varied between project/client - with Podio you can tune the environment to ensure that you only have the features you need and even better you can create your own apps if there is nothing suitable available; I've not tried this ...

Just a quick note to say that I've released v1.0.6 of MonitorWang - all the details are here . The main focus of this release is to add some more HealthChecks... Windows Service State and Startup type Checks - monitors that services are in the expected state (eg: running) and have the correct startup type (eg: automatic). Url Ping - pings your urls checking for http failures and slow performance (response threshold configurable) PS: I'd love to hear from anyone using MonitorWang - what sort of checks are you running, any problems or suggestions you have would be great! J

Just a quick note to say that I've released v1.0.5 of MonitorWang - all the details are here . The main feature is "Growl Notification Finalisers" - these allow you to modify the Growl notification based on the result or result count plus you can easily write your own Finaliser to adjust the Growl Notification priority or message text based on your custom logic. There is also a major bugfix to the Castle Interceptor logic that affects the Publisher Filters. Enjoy - please report any problems via the "discussions" tab on the codeplex site.

Big release this.... Added support for SQLite databases Added a check that captures energy usage data from an Owl Energy Monitor Added Publisher Filters to allow you to hook custom logic into the publication process Added support for swapping between data sources for you Geckoboard Data Service Activity Plus a refactor of the internal HealthCheck/Publisher mechanism (now uses the cool Magnum Pipeline components) More details on the v1.0.4 codeplex release page.

So I've just completed my first Google App Engine python app....I can't begin to say how awesome App Engine is...I had the python and Google Apps SDK installed and a Hello World app deployed onto world class infrastructure in about 20 mins flat. Deployment, simple! Management, simple! Python coding...not so simple (yet!). So after seeing how awesome it was I put it to good use and implemented an idea I had for the Geckoboard Number widget - a day countdown. I've already implemented this in MonitorWang so if you use this (does anybody? I've had nearly 200 downloads but not a single comment about it, not a single one, good, bad or indifferent!) you can plug your Geckoboard into that. However a conversation with Hugo the other day piqued my interest in Google App Engine and this seemed the ideal thing to use it for. Very simply you put the date to countdown to on the querystring and it returns the Geckoboard Number widget XML containing the number of days to go. T...

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!