Day Three of my course "Programming C# with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010".

The class has been very very intense.  A lot of information is being passed to us students.  I'm in a virtual class of 20.  Each day we learn new concepts in C# and do labs.  These concepts are coming to me.  It is going to take lots of practice to become comfortable with them.  My experience with SQL 2005 writing SQL code has been very helpful.  I am looking forward to doing some real work with these tools sets.  It is amazing the tool set that Microsoft has created in this software.  The software is really helpful in not just writing your code (Intellisense) but also with organizing your code and creating documentation.

Network Monitoring (Part One)

I mentioned last week that I would speak about creating software robots to watch your website for you.  I will speak of Microsoft technologies as these are the ones I am familiar with.  All computers, printers and digital based devices that connect to anything (network)  have (or should have) SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to help determine how that device is running.  SNMP is merely a very flexible language that performs two important functions.  Function one is to constantly update states (how one facet of that device).  (Example - A printer can either be Ready or Not Ready.  There is a state within that printer that contains that value.  This state can be interrogated by other network devices to read that state.  The number of states within one device can number in the thousands.  Function two of the same device is to send out 'messages' about how it is doing.  Digital networked devices are constantly chattering to anyone who will listen (usually a broadcast) about its current states or changing states. So on any network if SNMP is turned on.... there will be information being transmitted about every device that is connected to that network.  In my next blog entry i'll talk about how to capture all this chatter.