utility

Users of Brian Peek’s TweeVo application have obviously noticed that the application hasn’t been working since early September.  Twitter forced all applications to use the OAuth authentication scheme, and now TweeVo has been updated to work with this new requirement.  You can download…

Want to know if the earth is shaking?  How about if someone is moving your laptop?  Create a utility to detect movement so you'll know right away when something is happening! The Windows 7 sensors platform exposes a standard way of communicating with hardware for determining location,…

WEI Share ("We Share") is a Coding4Fun code sample that takes your Windows Experience Index score and shares it with the world (anonymously) to an Azure website with a Silverlight front end and lets you post your WEI score to Facebook for bragging rights. Try it:…

In this article, I'll demonstrate how to use your current location to figure out and set the time zone.  It turns out that this isn't nearly as easy as I thought it would be, so read on to learn what went into this seemingly straight-forward idea. This code requires Windows 7 due to the use of…

In this article, I'll demonstrate how to use the new Windows 7 location feature to download photos taken in your vicinity from Flickr and use them to update your desktop wallpaper. The utility is written as an addin for my previous Utility Runner project (the MEF application). Wallpaper changers…

Do people visit your desk when you're at meetings?  Do they leave you messages for when you get back?  If you're like me, you end up losing those messages half the time.  Here's a fun screensaver program that let's people leave messages for you right on your desktop.…

Pete Brown has created an example of accessing a scanner with WIA via WPF.  In the past we've chatted about going paperless with WIA and accessing a camera with it too, but Pete talks about how WIA the guts of it works and how to get  an application to leverage it.  To find out…

In this article, you'll learn how to use federated search in Windows 7 to easily locate items from various public and private sources directly from Windows Explorer. Introduction In this article, I've created a class file to encapsulate a federated search provider.  This lets you use the new…

David Veeneman wrote a neat little console application that will convert RGB colors to HLS (Hue-Luminance-Saturation) or HSB (Hue-Saturation-Brightness) over at Code Project. One of the neat things David also did was show off using IValueConverter as well to do some of the conversion for you.…

In this article, you'll learn how to create an application with full plug-in support. Introduction It's been a number of months since I released the first version of my Utility Runner application.  Utility Runner makes it possible to run system utilities with as little overhead as possible:…