I was surprised to find out that there are no applications, apparently, that will allow you to execute an application, or perform some task, when transitioning from AC to DC (battery). You see, I want to kill off extraneous processes when I switch to battery in order to conserve power. When I'm back on AC, I want to restart them (potentially).
Now, there are ways to script this, but I need a low-profile, always-on, app running in the background waiting for a power broadcast (PowerModeChangedEvent). Since I don't want to introduce more CPU overhead through a script, I opted to write a quick application to do what I wanted.
It's a really simple polling application that will execute actions based on an XML configuration file. It can be easily extended to do other things; I just needed to knock this out real quick.
This project is now hosted on CodePlex. You can get BatterySaver from here.
I wanted to create a list of the free (mostly) utilities that I use on a regular basis. I've found that a lot of people don't seek out tools to make their lives easier.. strange. This is not an exhaustive list, but it's a start.
Link Shell Extension
Create hard and symbolic links in windows
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html
Notepad++
Great general-purpose text editor
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
FastStone Capture *
One of the best screen capture apps out there. Simple and effective.
http://www.faststone.org
7zip
Best compression tool available
http://www.7-zip.org/download.html
Ditto
Great tool for keeping a clipboard history. Great for refactoring.
http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/
Virtual Clone Drive
Nice free ISO mounter - works in Windows 7
http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html
XPath Visualizer
Nice tool for testing XPath expressions without the bloat of larger multiple-purpose XML tools
http://xpathvisualizer.codeplex.com/
XML Explorer
Nice light-weight tool for working with XML
http://xmlexplorer.codeplex.com/
SyncBackSE *
Great tool for filesystem synchronization, there is a free version
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html
GrepWin
Coming from a Unix world, I need my grep. Search and replace, fast.
http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/grepWin
Mozy Home
The only online backup service I trust. Currently hosting 300GB of my precious data.
http://mozy.com/
TortoiseSVN
The only SVN client for Windows that's worth mentioning.
http://tortoisesvn.net/
VisualSVN Server
Great SVN server that run as a Windows service. Takes the headache out of manual setup.
http://www.visualsvn.com/
Snippet Compiler
Great tool for testing expressions outside of an IDE
http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/
Development Specific
LINQPad
Awesome LINQ tool and snippet compiler... awesome.
http://www.linqpad.net/
GhostDoc
Must-have tool for generating meaningful documentation stubs
http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx
Reflector
.Net assembly analyzer and disassembler
http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/
ReSharper *
Must-have tool for refactoring. Version 5 looks stellar.
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
VisualSVN *
Must-have SVN integration with Visual Studio 2005+
http://www.visualsvn.com/
* - Not free but worth the purchase price.
As any VisualStudio user knows, the VS installer includes a bunch of separate product installs. The problem is that when you want to uninstall VisualStudio, it leaves all of those "value add" products installed.
I was retiring an old development machine and started removing the components before running the main uninstaller. Well doing this screwed up the VS installer causing the "A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup." error.
In trying to solve this issue I found a handy tool provided by Microsoft which will undo the havoc that it had wreaked on your machine.
Behold, the AutoUninstallTool.