I know…you would. :)
No, no..I am not talking about any spy applications here. I am talking about Powertoys. The usage scenarios which I mentioned earlier are my brilliant ideas. ;) But yes as a matter of fact, you can do that. So, what are the Powertoys?
Powertoys are series of add-ins to Visual Studio 2005 to do small small things for you with Visual Studio. You can bundle all these small things and come up with a major usage scenario if you want. Now you will ask me how I met with these Powertoys first of all. To answer this, I would say “It’s a long story. :);)”. To begin with, I installed VS2005 SDK on my machines. After some days, I found one strange system tray icon. It was labeled as ‘Event Toaster’. After double clicking it, nothing happened. I tried to find out the trace or starting point for that Event Toaster in vain. After little bit of playing around, I was able to trace it back to Visual Studio 2005.
Currently, we have two types of Powertoys available as Indexed find and Event Toaster. I played little bit more with these Powertoys to realize its power. As I was more interested the Event Toaster (for the obvious reasons :)), I was wondering what can be done with it. Following are some of the events/built-in toasts supported by Event Toaster Powertoy:
1.Build (Build Done and Code Analysis Done)
2.Debug ( Entering Break Mode and Execution Session Completed)
3.Document (Document Opened and Document Saved)
In synchronization with above-mentioned built-in toasts, you can do following tasks:
1.Play sound (You can start the MP3 for example: ))
2.Run Command
3.Run Macro (You can write your own macro and do whatever you want in the background)
4.Taskbar Notification.
Microsoft will launch more such Powertoys in coming days. And we can make most out of it.
So, next time you hear this word “Powertoys”, you better be prepared to know its built-in toasts. ;)
Cheers,
Amol
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