Introduction:

“LoweAlert” is a project written in .Net 2.0. I did this “pro bono” for the flight operations folks at Lowe Army Heliport.

Background:

The Operations department gets weather data from numerous sources. This information is disseminated through 6 different Websites. The ops personnel had to go to these sites and retrieve and then compile the data. The biggest problem was that the data could change at anytime. During peak push times, ops personnel would get busy with other duties and the weather data would often get neglected. Since the data was critical to flight safety, ops needed a better way.

Features:

• Compiles data from numerous sources and displays the weather alert data in one location
• Auto-print feature formats and then prints the data within 1 min of being updated
• Sound alert (.wav) when any data is updated (if enabled)
• Prints MEF (Mission Execution Forecasts) direct to default printer as needed
• Converts between local and Zulu (UTC) time
• Zulu clock
• Last updated time
• Ability to save user settings

Technical Details:

• .NET 2.0/C# (WinForms)
• Utilizes a data scrapper class to retrieve data
• Utilizes regular expressions to parse data
• Uses a timer control to update data every min
• Used the "ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback" method to overcome the issue with Army security certificates: click here
• Writes a [serializable] class to the file system to save application data

Status:

No longer Used.

Updates:

None.