Tentacle Software

Thanks for the great response, everyone. I’m closing invitations now. If I need more testers, I’ll let you know here.

The new shiny GUI for v1.1 is going out to beta testers soon (hit the Contact link if you’d like to play), so I thought it would be fun to go back through the history of WHS Disk Management and have a look at how we used to do things.

By random chance, I happened to save screenshots of all the previous flavours of the interface, so we can do it in pictures!

Hello World

Here is my very first attempt at an Add-In. You can tell I’m using Brendan’s templates here because of the icon. Check out the “Storage Balanced” date: 8th of January, 2008!

A Working Add-In

We’ve got working code now, and according to the timestamp on the screenshot it’s only a day later: 9th of January, 2008.

With Wireframe

Awesome isometric perspective! Just goes to show how valuable my high school technical drawing classes were; behold the mighty 30/60 degree split. We’re now at 5th of April, 2008.

Going 3D

And here I am, having written my own 3D engine entirely using managed GDI+ code. This is the interface we’ve all come to know and love. The GUI has remained essentially unchanged since 24th of June 2008.

So what’s next?

I can’t ruin the surprise now, after waiting so long! Look for a post soon with the juicy details.

From ExtremeTech:

Diskeeper plans to introduce a file system filter driver later this year that will eliminate most file fragmentation before it actually occurs, company executives said Friday.

…

But the filter driver is designed to weed out about 75 percent of fragmentation before it ever occurs, by intercepting the data before it is written to the file system, and organizing it appropriately.

I wonder if they’ll be supporting WHS out of the box with this.