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 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...

TinyMCE is a great little WYSIWYG JavaScript text editor that we use quite often inside administration pages. It’s lightweight and just works out of the box. Well, except for the little issue of HTML encoding its output. When you submit an ASP.NET form that contains the TinyMCE text editor, you get this lovely message: A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client (ctl00$ContentBody$TextBoxBodyHtml="<p>Test!</p>"). Which is good, because that’s ASP.NET doing some checking and helping to protect your site from XSS attacks. The standard solution you see floating around the web...

Ran across this one today, and because it’s weird and annoying I thought I’d post a solution. You can thank me later! The problem goes like this: You’re using Visual Studio 2010 and trying to add a control to an APSX page in an ASP.NET Web Application targeted to .NET 4.0, and some controls don’t show up in IntelliSense. When you type the tag manually, Visual Studio complains that Element 'ListView' is not a known element. This can occur if there is a compilation error in the Web site, or the web.config file is missing....

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.

Source Control is a basic requirement of any development shop, even one-person teams. The first time a big refactoring operation seriously breaks your project and you can roll-back with just one click, you’ll be sold. There are a bunch of solutions out there for Visual Studio, but integration with the IDE is almost always going to cost you some money. I use VisualSVN, which costs a few dollars and requires TortoiseSVN to be installed on your local machine. If you’re after a free solution, Axosoft have just released v1.0 of their Visual Studio Subversion add-in called RocketSVN. It’s...