Hi Everyone.
Here we are well into 2024 and it has been a busy year or so since my last update. After our family move last year, we’ve been busy with renovations on the cottage here on the premises, with plans eventually to rent it, but that project has been slow going and it’s not quite done yet. Finding companies to do the work had proven to be difficult, especially since we are located well off the beaten path with few of them not wanting to come to this neck-of-the-woods to do the work. It took some time but we were able to secure some companies back in the spring, and recently (Aug 21, 2024), the major renos to make this building 4-season, (electrical, water, and heating), have been done, with the finer finishing details inside yet to accomplish. Fingers crossed this work is done by the new year.
Along with those renovations, we just spent all of August (22 of 31 days) entertaining family and friends willing to make the trek up here. Fun times and memories prevailed, but it sure made for a quick August. In the near future, my wife and I are headed out to Eastern Canada to visit our son and to enjoy what New Brunswick, P.E.I., and Nova Scotia have to offer. This will be a different trip than we recently took to Mexico (Grand Sirenis Riviera Maya Resort & Spa) back in April, but I’m definitely looking forward to whale watching and seeing Deadmau5 in concert! And, soon enough, the Christmas holiday season will be upon us.
So, yes, outside of my day job and some consulting work, there has been some fun too. I’ve actually for the first time in my career used all of my vacation days allotted for the year!
However, having said that, I’d like to disclose that the active development of SQL Agent Insights has been put on-hold for the foreseeable future. I know I’ve mentioned that this project would continue to receive updates a couple of times per year (in terms of new features, enhancements and bug fixes), but this was always a spare time project, and my spare time is being used on other resources for the time being. I have learned a lot since its inception back in 2008 (and its inaugural release back in 2010), originally using the SharpDevelop IDE and Visual Basic, but the scope creep of this project grew too large with a lot to maintain for a single developer; from the original programming language of choice, the framework to code in, and primary operating system shifts. With all of these variables constantly changing, migrating 33,000+ lines of code to work with these changing factors became very time consuming, taking away from its primary features. If there was one thing to take away from all of this (and there are a few), it is, don’t let anyone tell you that programming in today’s information technology space is easy!
SQL Agent Insights had grander ambitions, to be an all encompassing SQL Server monitoring utility. For me, a light bulb came on a long time ago that other, better monitoring tools are in the market that have teams behind them that probably should be used, so I decided then to pare down the product to focus directly on the SQL Agent and monitoring of that subset of SQL Server, something that I still find lacking within SSMS today.
SQL Agent Insights will receive at least one more license update in the coming months to extend out its use for a bit longer. Additionally, as long as Microsoft continues to support and distribute .NET Framework 4.8.1, you shouldn’t have a problem running it in Windows 10 (or 11 for that matter).
I still have a passion for programming, and am taking what I have learned and applying those concepts to a new project, SQL Job Commander. This project is very much in its infancy, but the goal is to have the heart and core of SQL Agent Insights (i.e., manipulation of SQL Server Agent jobs and properties), refined and scaled down (no monitoring at this point), with a more modern UI utilizing a more modern framework that will be easier to upgrade in the future.
This will give me the opportunity to learn something new and with SQL Job Commander, I’m hoping to provide an experience that will replace using the Job Activity Monitor in SSMS. I will definitely have more concrete updates on this project in the future.
Cheers.