For a while I have been working on a small program that gives me a little piece of mind when working with Recorded TV in Media Center. A while back I had a problem with Recordings not working due to a corruption in Recordings.XML, I only noticed the problem a while after it has started and I missed quite a few recordings.  So that go me thinking that I would like to have some kind of monitor on the status on Media Center, something not unlike Windows Home Servers heath status. Now I know that corruption errors are very rare (once this year for me) but I wanted to get the status of other errors too, like if Media Center missed a recording due to the power being off or a IR blaster cable has been pulled out etc. Plus it’s nice to see easily everything is ok . I also wanted an excuse to play with Visual Studio 2008 and thought it was better to start with a hobby program rather than on my core apps at the office 🙂

So I have written "Media Center Health Monitor", this monitors the Media Center Event Log and warns of Recording errors and any service issues that would effect the recordings. The program sits in the tray has has health status, Green = All is OK, Yellow = Warnings and Red=Service Errors. See the screen shots bellow:

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The app is written in VB using .NET framework 3.5 and deployed using ClickOnce. This beta is a desktop only version but I do have plans for other ways of being alerted in the future, eg Sidebar, other network devices etc

 

So I am looking for beta testers to have a play with the application, if you interested email beta [at] thedigitallifestyle.com and I will send you a URL

The forum to discus the application is Thread for my new application Media Center Health Monitor

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