Tentacle Software

Tim and Andrew from Using Windows Home Server have posted a video preview and walkthrough of Blackbox for Windows Home Server. Go check it out.

Big thanks to the WHS community for the great response to our CTP announcement for Blackbox. We’ve got our test team full for this initial round, but look out for more opportunities soon.

It’s that time again! Tentacle Software is looking for testers for our latest Windows Home Server Add-In, Blackbox for Windows Home Server. Blackbox for Windows Home Server provides in-depth real-time monitoring of motherboard, disk, UPS, and graphics card hardware sensors. Administrators can define alerting rules to take actions when a sensor exceeds a specified threshold.   This is a preview release of Blackbox and is intended to showcase the major features that will be present in the release version, and to give our users the opportunity to provide input on the final feature-set....

Last year, Nick from ASoft wrote a comprehensive set of documentation for WHS v1 Add-In development. He’s now released an updated version for “Vail”. Version 1.1 of the WHS DevKit 2 has been published. This Kit is an all-in-one package on how to create/build/install and addin for Vail, so if you want to have a go at it take the kit and have fun! This new version has been updated to support the latest version of Windows Home Server: build 7659. You can find Nick’s documentation over at the ASoft Blog.

A while back I posted a guide on how to get WiX to automatically set the installation package’s version, and how to rename the output package to include the same version number. The instructions still work great, but it all felt a bit too messy. I’ve spent a bit of time with WiX 3.5 over the last few days (because only WiX 3.5 beta supports Visual Studio 2010), and I’ve been able to solve a few niggling issues with my previous installers. Cleaning up how I name the output package is one of those. I’m still...

The Home Server Show is the best podcast in the world because it’s about my favourite subject: Windows Home Server! The boys have just recorded and released their 100th episode, and as part of the celebration we’re providing a super-secret coupon code to get 50% off Disk Management. We’ve also thrown five free licenses for Disk Management into the prize pool as well. You’ll need to hit the Home Server Show site to get the code. Hurry, the special is only going to last one week!

The We Got Served forums have a dedicated board for user-submitted ideas for Windows Home Server Add-Ins. I like to know what users think WHS is missing, so I keep an eye out for any new posts. Yesterday, Ron Levenberg posted an interesting request: I would love to be able to get a daily e-mail that confirms to me that all my PCs connected to my home server have been backed up successfully and, if not, which PCs don't have current backups. It could be something like the Computers & Backups page data. I don't...

Great video on Channel 9 with Fabian Uhse evangelising the “Vail” SDK. Confirms Microsoft’s commitment to Windows Home Server extensibility. Fabian hints that retail “Vail” will be running .NET 4.0 and not .NET 3.5, so we won’t have to wait for it to be pushed via Windows Update. Awesome.

I heart WPF in Visual Studio because it’s incredibly easy to separate business logic from the user interface. However, I don’t really heart the Visual Studio WPF designer. Expression Blend 4 is out now, so I just loaded up our latest secret Windows Home Server Add-In project (it’s WPF, did I mention how much I love WPF?). And I was greeted with this lovely error message: Exception: An error occurred while finding the resource dictionary “/PresentationFramework.Aero;V3.0.0.0;31bf3856ad364e35;component\themes/aero.normalcolor.xaml”. StackTrace: Empty InnerException: None Which is helpful. Obviously, we’re forcing WPF...

Andreas has found himself what looks like a great alternative to WiX for building Add-In packages, Advanced Installer. It ticks all the boxes: Free (as in beer) Wizard-driven No dependencies on a particular version of Visual Studio Can be run using build scripts in your project Best of all, the freeware version’s EULA includes this clause: Caphyon grants you an unlimited license to use the Freeware Features of the Software. The install packages created using only the Freeware Features can be...