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Windows Monitoring – Codeplex

After three and a half years, time came to update a personal project hosted on Codeplex. It’s called Windows Monitoring.
This project is meant to provide programmers with a set of reusable classes, gathered into one assembly, to develop custom system monitoring consoles for windows server systems.
The base set provides classes with methods to check:

• Network ping
• HTTP server running
• FTP server running
• Disk space on system hard drive
• Database availability

Open for evolution is the adittion of methods related to Mail Servers, such as Exchange, or Domain controllers.
I took the dust off the Codeplex account, logged in using Visual Studio 2010 together with Team Explorer and migrated the code from .NET 2.0 onto 4.0.
The update projects and source code can be browsed and downloaded. If you don’t have Visual Studio, but some other IDE, you can download the assembly on the recommended release and use the tester source code as a usage example.
Happy coding!

Manually placing pending OneNote updates to SkyDrive

I use Microsoft’s Office OneNote from Office 2010 for the all-purpose note taking that goes on a daily basis. Some time ago, changes on the workplace corporate network blocked the Skydrive sync feature.
On a careless fashion, I kept taking notes from tasks and e-mails and the pending updates stacked up. Final picture: ended up with a really stuffed set of notes missing from the online service.
No matter how I tried to start the process, the merge between the notes always failed on the Windows Live ID login step.
The web browser view on Skydrive presents the notebook as a single item, but OneNote stores the different sections of a notebook on separate “.one” files.  For the whole notebook there is a table of contents “.onetoc2” file. So the potential solution was to replace the Skydrive files with the local backup files that had all the recent updates.
The solution wasn’t feasible on the Web browser Skydrive functionality, as it presents the notebook as a single item. It was a four step process:

1. Get Skydrive to open on Windows Explorer.
2. Backup your online notebook to a local folder and open it.
3. Open the files from the local OneNote backup folder.
4. Copy the local files over the old ones.

To get skydrive as a local shortcut that opens on Windows explorer, you can follow the instructions here.
Backup your online copy to a local folder. Open the notebook on OneNote.
To get the local backup of your skydrive files, it should be on a folder path like “C:\Users\[Your user name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\14.0\Backup”. Replace [your user name] with the real deal. Open the notebook on OneNote.
With both versions of the notebook open, check if there are missing notes and copy/paste them into the copy with the least updates missing.
Finally, copy the whole “.one” files from the updated version, replacing the ones on Skydrive, using Windows Explorer.
HTH.