Why did I create a delayed startup program? After I saw all the stuff my manager had booting up on his computer, I thought this may be useful. His computer really wasn't terribly usable for a good 10 minutes after a reboot so I decided to spend a few minutes and create him a nice program while I'm at a .Net User Group meeting (they had free food and it was 1 floor up in my building). My theory is most of the programs in your startup folder aren't actually needed asap. I don't need OneNote open right away, I don't need a bunch of other stuff right away. The nice thing is now I can have Visual Studio, Outlook, IE, and a few other programs I run everyday not impact me restarting my computer's bootup time since they'll do a gradual loading sequence.
Why isn't there an application to do the configuration file? Because I'd hope someone could decipher 3 lines of XML.
Here is the source code (and the .zip file) and the installer
Source Code:
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
string startupPath = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Startup);
string delayedStartupFolder = GetSetting("DelayedStartupFolderName", "Delayed Startup");
int TimeDelayBeforeStartingSeconds = GetSetting("TimeDelayBeforeStartingSeconds", 10);
int TimeDelayPerProcesssSeconds = GetSetting("TimeDelayPerProcesssSeconds", 5);
DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(startupPath);
Thread.Sleep(TimeDelayBeforeStartingSeconds * 1000);
string delayedFolder = Path.Combine(di.Parent.FullName, delayedStartupFolder);
if (Directory.Exists(delayedFolder))
{
di = new DirectoryInfo(delayedFolder);
FileInfo[] files = di.GetFiles();
foreach (FileInfo file in files)
{
if (file.Extension.ToLower() != ".ini")
{
Process.Start(file.FullName);
Thread.Sleep(TimeDelayPerProcesssSeconds * 1000);
}
}
}
}
private static int GetSetting(string key, int defaultValue)
{
int.TryParse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key], out defaultValue);
return defaultValue;
}
private static string GetSetting(string key, string defaultValue)
{
return ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[key] ?? defaultValue;
}
App.Config:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="DelayedStartupFolderName" value="Delayed Startup"/>
<add key="TimeDelayBeforeStartingSeconds" value="10"/>
<add key="TimeDelayPerProcesssSeconds" value="5"/>
</appSettings>
</configuration>