Neil Terry's Blog: May 2009

Thursday, 14 May 2009

Exceptioneer - wow much nicer than WinQual

I have recently been given an invitation to try out Exceptioneer which is a new online service aimed at Microsoft .NET developers and currently supports ASP.NET & Javascript and WinForms, Consoles and Services.

The service provides the ability to track and manage unhandled exceptions in your .NET developed products via a secure website portal. The website portal details each product that has had an unhandled exception raised against it which you can then tunnel into and display a list of each unique type of fault which has occurred. The fault will contain in most cases a stack dump along with the exception to help identify the cause of the problem.

First you are required to create an account, you then need to implement a small .NET library in your application and invoke it when a "Unhandled Exception" occurs. I had an existing project implemented and had the code up and running in minutes, my code already trapped unhandled exceptions collecting them in text files and DMP files so this was a great addition and helped compliment the code I already had providing a much richer set of features and function.

So how does it work?? When your Exceptioneer integrated application is released and fails, the exception is captured along with further details surrounding your application like version and assembly details is submitted to the Exceptioneer Web Site for processing. This is transmitted via http so in theory should always reach it's destination if running on an Internet accessible PC. Upon receipt Exceptioneer processes the Exception with data and presents this on a nice Web Portal for the application developer to view. It will also raise email alerts and twitter alerts to the account owner to advise of a new failure.

Exceptioneer currently supports ASP.NET & Javascript and Windows Forms/Consoles and Services but they plan to release a version for WCF in future.

Exceptioneer is a great online asset to improving your products quality and understanding more about failures that you might never get to hear about from your customers.

Great work Phil and thanks for the invitation.

I look forward to more updates and further support.

Please note Exceptioneer is currently operating on an invite only basis - but this will hopefully change in the not to distant future.

Labels: .NET, Exception, Exceptioneer

Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Blerp - New Web 2.0 application launched

Today a San Francisco startup RocketOn has launched it's second product named Blerp.

It's ambition is to turn the Web into a giant interactive message board by making it possible for visitors to annotate websites they visit with their own personal comments and post multimedia pictures and video.

Blerps motto is "Layer the web!" - basically allowing it's users to create a virtual layer or space on top of any website that you visit. The layer will be in the form of sidebar or header and is likely to even conatin a rating section for the site being viewed.

Users will have to create a Blerp account, once created they will get their own homepage which will be named "My Stuff" allowing them a overall dashboard of what is currently being discussed by their friends online, allowing further comments to be added. The larger the discussion the more chance it will get featured on the Blerp homepage.

Discussions are going to be in two forms - user based or community based. Community based discussions will be created by Blerp system and will not be owned by anyone. Each web site will contain a community discussion board.

Blerp is currently in Alpha mode so expect a few teething troubles if you attempt to use it.

I'm currently not sold on the idea - and yet to think how useful this could be in the industry, but it's another Web 2.0 or Social Interaction application which has sprung up.

Blerp - http://www.blerp.com/browser/welcome

Labels: Blerp, Social Interaction, web 2.0