5 great add-ins according to LifeHacker.com

LifeHacker has published an  article on ‘Five Great Add-ins to Power Up Your Windows Home Server Console’.
AutoExit is featured in it, you can find the article here.

Windows 7 Launch Party from Dave Mc Cabe

Dave McCabe is throwing a Windows 7 launch party on 22/10 in Southern Wisconsin.

See the details here: http://homeservershow.com/southern-wisconsin-windows-7-launch-party-win7meetup.html

AutoExit on TekZilla

Well, I do have to admit that I’m creating a bit of a copycat post here…
Today I was reading through the blogs and found this post from Sam Wood.
So I went to watch the video, only to see that AutoExit was also featured on it!

AutoExit can be seen at 15:37 & 15:44 over here.
I’ve never heared of Tekzilla.com before but it looks like a very nice site. (Thanks for the tip Sam )

AutoExit on Tekzilla.com

AutoExit 2009 Release Candidate

2 months ago Beta-1 of AutoExit was released.
Thanks for all the great feedback you guys sent me!

In the meantime, time didn’t stand still and I worked on the last main feature that was planned for the 2009 version: making it multilingual.
The Release Candidate now fully supports: French, German & Japanese!

I have to give a special thanks to these people for helping with the translations, it couldn’t have been done without them:
Yoshihiro Okabe (WHS MVP): http://hatono-tani.spaces.live.com (Japanese)
Sébastien (French WHS Site): http://blog.monhomeserver.fr (French)
Christian Baumann: http://blog.chriss-baumann.de/ (German)

Let me know if you find spelling mistakes so that they can be fixed by the final version.

I still haven’t found any translator for Spanish, mail me if you are interested in helping out!

Download the new version here: http://www.asoft-ware.com/download.php?id=36

AutoExit 2009 (Muliple Languages)

Have fun!
Nick

Undocumented WHS Classes: NetworkUtils

Another small class, in the series of undocumented API’s in Windows Home Server.

This new article describes the undocumented functions in the NetworkUtils class which is located in WHSCommon.dll.
This class contains 2 handy functions to get IP/Mac address of the server & the IP of the router.

void GetRouterIPAndServerMAC(out string ip, out string mac)
Get the IP address of the router and mac address of the server.

Sample code
string ip, mac;
NetworkUtils.GetRouterIPAndServerMAC(out ip, out mac);

Sample output
IP: 172.19.3.1
MAC:00-19-DB-7B-6D-35

string GetServerIP()
Get the IP address of the server.
Sample code
string serverIp = NetworkUtils.GetServerIP();

Sample output
IP: 172.19.3.10

So as you see, two very easy to use functions, that a very handy!
You can follow ASoft @Twitter: http://twitter.com/asoftware

Have fun!

P80 add-in v1.3 from Kris Rodenhausen released and now works together with AutoExit!

Kris Rodenhausen, the author of the add-in P80 has released a new version!

What is P80? (The name comes from Port 80)
It’s a website that you can view via your homepage.
It gives a central overview of various kinds of information that you normally would need to query from all kinds of places (via WHS Console, via RDP,…).
It provides a lot of information into one compact website, this also has the advantage that it can be viewed using a web enabled mobile phone.
P80 is still very young, but it has a lot of potential and it’s already very good.

Kris contacted me, to ask if I wanted to cooperate by giving him an interface to AutoExit so that he could use functionality of AutoExit and implement it in his add-in.
So I thought: why not? I liked the add-in and it seemed like a nice extension.
We worked together on getting this going and you can now view the result in this new release.

That means you can now use your mobile phone to shut down/reboot/… your machines too! (Of course you need to have AutoExit 2008R2 or 2009 installed)

You can find an extensive review on the site from Andrew Edney: http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2009/09/27/review-of-the-p80-add-in-for-windows-home-server

Download it here

Ever had a problem with the console loading?

I recently had a problem with my WHS, suddenly ‘out of the nowhere’ the console wouldn’t load normally.
I got this message :
The Windows Home Server Console experienced a problem with a feature during the previous attempt to open it. If the problem persists, please call Product Support.
Try to open the console again, click Retry. …

To start my investigation I went to the Event Viewer -> nothing.
Then I looked into the the HomeServerConsole.log, which is located here:
%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Home Server\logs

From a certain date, I started to have this message in the log: UI: Error: Unfinished DLL: HomeServerConsoleTab.Media.dll. User chose to block.

I was certain that I hadn’t changed anything, so I suspected the add-ins.
I uninstalled them, but to no avail.

After a bit of thinking of what I could have changed, I remembered that I turned on ‘Remote Access’.
But the router didn’t have upnp support so it had the status ‘Not Available’ with the buttons ‘Repair’ & ‘Turn Off’ enabled.

I clicked ‘Turn Off’ and restarted the console and believe it or not, it worked again!
This is an example of a very unclear message, that doesn’t seem to be related (HomeServerConsoleTab.Media.dll vs Remote Access) and I hope Microsoft will fix this.

Join the WHS ‘ClubHouse’

The WHS Team has created the ‘WHS ClubHouse’.

‘The Clubhouse is a place that brings together people using their blogs to help others understand how to use Windows Home Server.’
Have a look here for more details: here

Undocumented WHS classes: QShutdown / ShutdownDialog

A new article in the series of undocumented API’s in Windows Home Server is here.

This new article describes the undocumented functions in the QShutdown & ShutdownDialog class which is located in HomeServerControls.dll.

This class is a very tiny and simple one that can be used to shut down / reboot / log off the server.
It is also responsible for showing the shutdown dialog when shutting down the server via the settings dialog in the Windows Home Server console itself.

You can find it here.

You can follow ASoft @Twitter: http://twitter.com/asoftware

Have fun!

AutoExit on the Japanese version of Windows Home Server

With the release of the Japanese Home Server SDK and a 120 day evaluation for the Japanese Home Server Software, I thought why not have a go at installing this and testing if AutoExit works on this one.
Luckily I had a step by step gallery here http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12554_22-62751.html to get me through those screens.

After having installed the Japanese version with AutoExit, I had a test drive and up until now, now problems have been detected…

Some labels appear a bit strange or some minor truncations but nothing major and shutting down the clients works as expected.

AutoExit Japanese

More details on the Japanese version can be found here: http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2009/08/22/windows-home-server-software-development-kit-sdk-adds-japanese-language-support.aspx