Karl B

..you’re writing a program to solve sudoku puzzles.

I know there must be hundreds, nay, thosands of implementations out there but I figured why not give it a go. I’m current writing a program to solve sudoku puzzles just as a mental exercise in designing the algorithm to do it.

A problem I keep coming up against is I constantly think about ways to optimize it when I havn’t even finished writing the program and I have to decide whether I finish the current implementation or to go back and refactor it. I’m also often distracted by side issues like how to input the puzzle into the program or display it to the user.

After mulling over my previous post where I talked about server monitoring at work a thought came to me. I’ve been wanting to get back into programming as I haven’t done any serious coding since I was at university over 4+ years ago (I feel that I’m stagnating in the learning department) so I took the rant and decided hey, a project!

My thought is this: Monitoring agents should not really be needed on a server. From my workstation I can bring up a list of events from a remote server using eventvwr or a list of services by managing a server so why can’t monitoring tools?

I busted out Visual C# and after bumbling my way around for awhile I found System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController which you can use to find all the services and their current statuses on a local or remote machine that you have permissions on. In the coming weeks I expect I’ll be talking more about this as I try to write some rudimentary monitoring software.

Karl Out.

PS: Please don’t point out free software online which already does this, I’ve been trying to think of a good project for awhile and now that I have one I don’t want to lose it.