Here are some small tools I've built over the years to help myself to be more productive. Most of them are written in Visual Basic 6, but I've fiddled with porting a few of them to VB.NET. However, as I'm not working in that development environment right now, my incentive to port them has declined considerably of late.

Many of these tools are available as both installs and source code, under a Creative Commons "Share Alike" license. Click here for more information on exactly what that means.

Attaché is a tool I use to keep my files in sync between my office computer, and my home computers.

This mainly came about because I was dissatisfied with the built-in tools that are available in Windows (I'm looking at YOU, Briefcase).

It's pretty simple, really... it allows you to set a cutoff date and one or more source folders, then allows you to search through those folders for all the files created or modified since the target date. Then you can check the ones you want to sync, and with one click of the mouse, you can create a complete zip file that contains all of your files, with full path info for easy synchronization on the target machine.

Planned future enhancements include the ability to automatically sync the archive on the target machine, possibly even including a visual diff/merge display.

Bat'leth is an incredibly useful tool I built a while back to help with the processing of large data files. At the time I was doing a lot of data mining: digging into old text-based, non-xml datafiles to find the juicy bits. This was a pain, even with a good text editor that supported regular expressions and macros (like my favorite, TextPad). So I built my own personal tool to automate the process... thus was born Bat'leth, the ultimate general-purpose text slicer/dicer (please don't sue me, Star Trek people =P).

One of the most useful ways to use the Bat'leth is to take semi-structured flatfiles (like EDI, CSV, etc) and convert them into a pseudo-xml output that can then be parsed, queried, transformed with XSL, etc.

One of the coolest things about this app, from a code standpoint, is that it actually has an associated filetype, the Bat'leth Workspace (.bws). Since there are so many options to set and since I got tired of typing them all in every time, you have the option to save them to a the xml-based workspace type, then load them back later. The first time you run the EXE, it will register itself as the default handler for BWS files. I think I configured the MSI installer to do it too, but I'm not sure (it's been a while)

Have you ever wondered where all of your disk space has gone to? Boy, I know I have... Even with the nigh-bottomless 500GB hard drives we have these days, it's amazing how quickly we manage to find ways to fill them up. (Especially when you work in multimedia like I do! Music, videos, custom DVD projects -- I never could have done this stuff with my old 40 MB drive!)

... but I digress. BloatScope was born out of this frustration, of having dwindling free space on my hard drive, and not knowing exactly why. Give it a root folder to start from (say, "C:\personal" for example) and it will enumerate all the files and folders that are children of that root.

"So what?" I hear you saying... "Windows Explorer does that too."

Ah, but here's the difference -- Explorer doesn't tell you at a glance how much space each sub-folder is using up!

When you see a big space hog (my MUGEN folder in this screenshot, for example), you can double-click on it to drill into that child folder to enumerate its contents, drilling down as many levels as necessary to find the ginormous files that are the cause of your free space trauma. Anyway, it's useful to me, maybe it'll be useful to you too.

This simple tool does something helpful when I'm moving a lot of files around on my hard drive, for example organizing my mp3 collection or family photos. Simply, if there's a folder containing many subfolders, and the files I want are in those subfolders (or worse, in sub-subfolders), I simply point FolderFlattener at that top-level folder, and it will grab every file it can find in that folder heirarchy, no matter how deeply buried in subfolders, and move them up to the top folder. Simple, but useful.

MassRenamer is a small tool I wrote a while back because I got sick and tired of having to rename a whole slew of files with a similar pattern... mp3s ripped from a CD with a bad naming convention, digital photos from several dates all dumped with a single date in the filename, and so on.

It was my first attempt to get an Explorer shell extension working, and I'm pretty proud of the results... you can right-click on a group of files in Windows Explorer, select "Rename with RegEx", and they would get loaded into the file list in the renamer app... it's saved me a TON of time & headaches, maybe it will for you too.

TBD

TimeClock is a small systray program to help you keep track of the time you spend on one or more projects. It's pretty simple to use, just run it and try it out.