Brian Ritchie's Blog

Migrating from ASPX MVC views to Razor

 Razor-based view templates are a much cleaner way to construct MVC views in ASP.NET.  However, they were only released fairly recently with MVC3.

 If you still have some ASPX-based templates that you'd like to upgrade, Telerik has released a free tool to do just that.

Web-based Farm Monitor for your Web Farm Framework Deployment

 In my recent posts on scalability, I've mentioned the Web Farm Framework (WFF) as a solution for managing a farm of IIS servers.  It adds a nice management Server Farm management UI into the IIS Manager.

 It is a nice tool, but is only accessible via the windows interface. To make the farm more accessible, I've created a basic farm monitor MVC web site using the WFF .NET API.

 Here are a couple of screen shots of it in action:

 It uses a few cool features of the API:

1. Getting a list of nodes in the farm & their status
   

   Microsoft.Web.Farm.WebFarmManager manager = new Microsoft.Web.Farm.WebFarmManager();            
   foreach (var farm in manager.WebFarms)
   {
       foreach (var node in farm.Servers)
       {
       }
   }

2. CPU/Memory monitoring.  See my sparkline post to learn how to create these kinds of infographics.
   

   PercentageCPU = node.Counters.ProcessorTime/100;
   MemoryAvailableKBytes = node.Counters.MemoryAvailableKBytes;
   PercentageMemoryAvailable = 1.0f - node.Counters.PercentageMemoryAvailable

3. Getting a list of running processes
   

   private static ServerProcess[] GetNodeProcesses(string farmName, string nodeName)
   {
       var manager = new Microsoft.Web.Farm.WebFarmManager();
       var farm = manager.WebFarms[farmName];
       var server = farm.Servers[nodeName];
       var processes = server.RunOperation(farm.CreateRunOperationOptions("GetProcesses")) as ServerProcess[];
       return processes;
   }