Codeplex Projects of the Week.

Two Codeplex projects have come in quite handy for  me this week and I thought I’d pass them on.

 

WSUS 3.0 – WSUS Smart Approve

I installed Windows Server Update Services on my Windows Home Server 2011 this week.

As usual, I was in a bit over my head. I hit the Approve All Updates nuclear option. Knowledgeable sysadmins are possibly cringing or screaming at me (or both). By the time i figured out that approving updates puts them in the download queue, 4 and a half gigabytes were in the queue. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem. But my broadband has had issues and it’s ridiculously slow (0.85 MBPS) and WSUS was eating up all the bandwidth.

So this was a problem. The solution was, of course to approve and download only needed updates. Amazingly, WSUS has no way of automatically approving needed updates (even as a checkbox buried five or six option screens down and off by default).

So, Codeplex to the rescue!

WSUS Smart Approve does exactly what it says on the tin – automatically approving updates according to certain rules. One of those is, of course, to approve needed updates automatically.

 

MetaWeblogAPI – ooMetaWeblog

One of the nice things about the MetaWeblogAPI is that almost everyone supports it. One of those is, of course, Windows Live Writer 2011.

Using Windows Live Writer as a WYSIWYG editor would be convenient.

There are a number of options to implement a server-side MetaWeblogAPI endpoint. Scott Hanselman has one approach.

I used another approach  – the Matlus.MetaWeblogAPI.

The corresponding Codeplex project is ooMetaWeblog.

 

Hope they come in helpful for somebody.