Monthly Archives: January 2014

How to get the full update for VS2013

Posted by on 2014/01/23 No comments

This tip applies to all editions and even previous versions (2012, 2012) of Visual Studio.

Since Microsoft has been releasing these updates e.g. VS2013.1 etc) the default behavior for these installers are to just download what is need at the time they are run. This is all good and well if you have only one machine that needs updating. What happens if you have to update a whole bunch of installs?

Luckily the VS2013.x installers support an undocumented (or not well) command line parameter ‘/layout’ that allows you to have the full update downloaded to a local folder. From there you can run the same installer without the parameter and it won’t download any additional stuff again.

Full command: VS2013.1.exe /layout

Happy downloading… only once.

QuickMon 3 Beta

Posted by on 2014/01/21 No comments

A quick heads-up. I’ve released a Beta version of QuickMon3 on CodePlex. I’ll post a more detail listing of all the features once the final version is relased but here is a quick summary:

1. Introduction of ‘Remote agents’, aka The Windows service acts as a remote host so collectors can be run as if they run on the host machine (where the service runs). It makes use of WCF.
2. Consolidation of existing Ping collectors (ICMP, HTTP and sockets)
3. Simplification of UI (as far as possible)
4. ‘Editing’ configuration can be done straight from the main UI (no separate editing window)
5. ‘Service windows’ have been changed a bit (simplified I hope)
6. It is not 100% compatible with qmconfig files of version 2.0 (will attempt to upgrade them but then QuickMon 2 won’t be able to use them anymore.
7. It can run side-by-side with QuickMon 2 – provided it is installed into a separate directory (default anyway)

QuickMon 3 use the .Net 4.0 framework and was developed using VS2013 Express for Desktop. It has been tested on Windows 7 (x64), Windows 8, 2003, 2008 so far – but it should work on all versions compatible with .Net 4.0.

Go grab it here.

MainWindow Example

MainWindow Example