I wanted to give y'all a status report on the development of Home Server SMART for WHS 2011. It's still a ways away from being a mature product, as WHS 2011 and .NET 4 both bring plenty of idiosyncrasies to the table. However, I did get a fair amount of the UI put together. For the most part, the UI you knew and loved (hopefully) from Home Server SMART for WHS v1, has been retained. I rehashed a number of controls including FancyListView from WHS v1, because this was the best way for me to integrate icons and pictures into a ListView without having to buy some God-awfully expensive third party controls package.
So you'll see the disk selector, with health indicator icons, the physical disk characteristics and, of course, the SMART details, just like you do now. A new feature will enable you to ignore a disk entirely. I've gotten reports from some folks that HSS (for WHS v1) erroneously reads SMART data from some disks and/or controllers (it sounded that a RAID controller was reporting back data just as a single disk), and so if you see this behavior, you'll be able to ignore the disk, and HSS will pretend it's not there.
Also, a program I developed previously called Taryn BitLocker Manager will be dovetailed in, to some extent. Since WHS 2011 supports BitLocker Drive Encryption, which enables you to encrypt each hard disk, you will be able to secure your data by encrypting (or decrypting) hard disks attached to the Server.
Like I said, it's a pre-alpha build, and not ready for public release just yet--not even for testing--but I thought I'd throw a couple screen shots out there for your viewing pleasure. Comments and feedback are welcome and encouraged!
Preview of the main screen (and no, my disks aren't really failing -- I changed some data in the Registry to make them appear that way!):
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File comment: HSS 2011 main screen preview
Early alpha CTP.png [ 292.64 KiB | Viewed 10239 times ]
If something within the application goes wrong, I get the Dunce hat...if you get an error, why not add some lighthearted fun?
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File comment: New error dialogue for when something bad happens!
Early alpha FAIL.png [ 406.02 KiB | Viewed 10239 times ]
Matt