I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code.
-- Unknown

Introduction.

I've got this dual monitor setup at home, a widescreen monitor and a standard aspect monitor rotated 90 degrees. Every now and then I'd like to change my desktop background and I have quite an extensive collection of images that I've taken that I'd like to rotate around. So how do you do it? I couldn't find anything obvious in windows, there is a screensaver that kind of does what I want, but I want to swap this during normal operations. So I surfed the web a little bit and concluded that all of the hits I found sucked :). So I decided to write one on my own.

C# is so simple.

Since I was doing a windows gui app, I decided to write it in C#, also a good excuse to get more practice with the language, I practically forgotten most of the things I learned due to Charles forcing me back down in San Diego. Wow. No Unit Tests either. It's so simple. So this was really fun to put together. It's a really silly little application, but it filled a need that I had gotten into my head that I wanted variation on my desktop. So how does it work? Simple, you start the application after installing it and the following picture will show up:

Desktop Commander screenshot

You then can go to the file menu and start adding pictures to the list. The list is stored when you specify save settings from the file menu as well as the interval to switch images. The app can be dismissed to the tray as well. The way I use it is to add a shortcut in my startup folder that also starts the application in minimized mode. That way I can have a program that changes my desktop every time I log on.

In closing.

One can question the sanity to have a program that takes about 40MB to change desktop pictures resident. I can only say that .NET is probably loved by the memory vendors. Luck has it (?) that I have 2GB in my desktop and 1.5GB in my laptop so it won't be a problem in the near future. Once can also question the lazy programmer (me) that keeps duplicate copies of the strings in memory...

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