Lucas Moffitt

Good things come in small downloadable automatic installing packages. and Web Platform Installer is no different.

My server at home runs the Web Platform installer 2.0 that installs and keeps everything up to date. Basic things such as the .Net Framework. IIS and Extensions, SQL Server and a whole heap of other stuff such as a version of PHP for windows. Click Here to check it out.

Once you’re done setting up it’s time to checkout the Web App Gallery.

OH, MY, GOD, CAKE

Couple of buttons and you can add in wordpress, moodle, Sitefinity (Awesome Asp.net CMS from Telerik) and my favourite ScrewTurn Wiki. Check them all out here.

It’s possibly the easiest thing you can do. And that’s not a lie.

Lucas

I don’t know…

Well i didn’t, but i do now!

Today my TEMPer USB thermometer arrived. I was quite disappointed to find out the state of the User Interface….

I need this thermometer to put in my server in the back room. (because i hate cords, and computer boxes everywhere i had to place it in a cabinet (I’ll do more posts on the modification of the cabinet later) )

Anyway I needed something more flexible, something that can update to twitter and / or send me a text message if it starts getting to hot in the upcoming warmer months. (sorry for the quality of the picture, the lighting is somewhat terrible )

I started out downloading the Temper.Communications.dll from the manufacturers website and dropped it into Red Gates .Net Reflector which you can download freely from here. The process was simple and within seconds i was able to see all i needed to create my own application for it.

So i cracked open Visual Studio 2008 (Thanks to Dreamspark) and did this up in VB.

Imports System
Imports TEMPer.Communication.Temperinterface

Public Class ServerTemp

    Dim AvailableComPorts$() = TEMPer.Communication.TEMPerInterface.FindDevices()
    Dim TEMPerInterface As New TEMPer.Communication.TEMPerInterface(AvailableComPorts$(0))

To read the temperature is simple…

Me.Text = TEMPerInterface.ReadTEMP

Or to find the port information

Me.Text = TEMPerInterface.PortName

After that it was as simple or as complex as you want to make it. All i wanted mine to do was send an SMS to my phone when the temperature surpassed a set ambient limit. (I decided on 40degees).

Thanks to my friends at SMSGlobal it was as simple as borrowing their API to send an SMS to my phone to warn me when the temperature started to rise.

I think it works well…

Lucas.