CurrentCost Power Monitor Software – Take 2

This post is an update to my previous one about the CurrentCost Energy Monitor and the software I built for it.

After posting brief details about it, I agreed with the guys over at the MSDN Coding for Fun site to write a full project article  for them. The suggested a couple of changes – using the Managed Extension Framework (MEF) stuff available in .NET 4 and a Windows Phone 7 client, to make it more generally appealing.

I had not seen the MEF stuff before, but it turned out great – very simple framework that allows a full ‘plugin’ style architecture in around 10 lines of code. I also had little experience with the Xaml stuff required for WinPhone 7 apps, but it is actually pretty simple.

There are a number of plugins and clients for it now including :

• A plugin to post to Twitter every X minutes (using oAuth)
• A plugin to post to Pachube streams
• A plugin to post to a web service
• A web page to display the latest readings sent to the web service
• A Windows Phone 7 application to display the latest reading sent to the web service
• A Windows Sidebar Gadget to display the latest reading sent to the web service

I have also had submissions from a couple of other developers, one for a plugin that posts to Google PowerMeter and another that records the readings in a database – both of these will be uploaded to the Codeplex site when I have them integrated into the source and working correctly.

Anyway, you can read all about it here. There is also a Codeplex site for all the source code and binaries.

Post in the comments if you have suggestions for other plugins or features, or want to get involved.