When you have a web site, for instance an installation of BlogEngine, you often want to be able to know about errors on it and if it is down. There are a lot of tools to help you out here, but in this post I will talk about using a build-in ASP.NET feature called Health Monitoring and a tool I wrote called WebMonitor.

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Some time ago I decided I wanted a new theme on my blog as I got tired of the old one. So, I started looking/searching for a nice theme for BlogEngine that I could use. After about 15 min. I had found ALL themes for BlogEngine on the web…very disappointed! I don’t know why, but there is very few themes for this blog engine out there. Why? I really don’t know, because it’s actually pretty easy to make them. Basically what I found was this: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/page/themes.aspx which have 4 links to sites that have some themes each. It’s NOTHING compared to Word Press.
As I got through the first 3 links on the link above I got more and more sad. Then I got to the 4. one http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com. This blog didn’t had a nice theme as a download, but it had a really nice looking theme on the blog it self. Through Twitter I contacted Janko Jovanovic which is the owner of the blog and creator of the theme. I asked which theme the theme were based on and he told me it were made by himself. Dammit, were my first thought :) I then asked if he would share the theme with me and he said that I could get inspired by it. So I did. :)

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I know this could be old news to a lot out there, but I just discovered this feature here the other day and it’s actually pretty smart. Windows Live Writer has a feature called “Auto Linking”, which is found in Tools>Options>Auto Linking.

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I just saw a discussion on my WebMonitor application on Codeplex, that a Chris Blankenship had asked me some questions and wrote an article on how he had improved my application.

His observation is really good. Normally WebMonitor uses a GET request to see if the web site is up. The reason I did that originally were because, as Chris also writes, that I sometimes need to look at the actual HTML on a particular web page.
What Chris has done is to change this to a HEAD request, as it saves data traffic and is more friendly to the server. In his article he writes how he did that, which is actually pretty easy.

Go and read his article, it pretty good and take a look at WebMonitor of cause :)

I will try to find the time to include this fix and make a new release.

- Enjoy!

It's a common functionallity that you always need. I have done this myself before this way:

if(System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.IsEnabled == true)

It have worked great in my projects, but today I found out that this isn't the best approach, as it doesn't always work. I found out when I read this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2009/02/26/designerproperties-getisindesignmode-forrealz-how-to-reliably-detect-silverlight-design-mode-in-blend-and-visual-studio.aspx

Go ahead and read it :)