Monitoring legacy code that fails silently

Clift Norris and I just posted an article on CodeProject entitled Monitoring Unreliable Scheduled Tasks about some software Clift wrote to resolve problems we had calling some legacy software that would fail silently. His software adds from the outside monitoring and logging functions that better software would have provided on the inside.

The monitoring and logging software, called RunAndWait, kicks off a child process and waits a specified amount of time for the process to complete. If the child does not complete in time, a list of people are notified by email. The software also checks return codes and writes all its activity to a log.

RunAndWait is a simple program, but it has proven very useful over the last year and a half since it was written. We use RunAndWait in combination with PowerShell for scheduling our nightly processes to interact with the legacy system. Since PowerShell has verbose error reporting, calling RunAndWait from PowerShell rather than from cmd.exe gives additional protection against possible silent failures.

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