Welcome to MOBZystems, Home of Tools!

Here, you'll find a selection of free developer tools, articles about software development issues, and open source code you can use any way you please. All tools are open source, hosted on GitHub (with the only exception of QuickCode.NET).

Tools

Visit the tools section for a list of open source tools and utilities that make up the indispensible MOBZuite™ suite of developers tools. Each of these tools is lightweight, easy to use, and *FREE*. All source code is available on GitHub.

See Through Windows

[Our bombshell - 20,000 downloads on CodePlex and counting!] Press a hotkey to make the current window transparent, allowing you to see through it! Also: press hotkeys to minimize/maximize the current window, or to send it to another monitor.

MOBZync

Inspect the differences in the contents of two folders at a glance, and optionally synchronize in one or both directions.

MOBZHunt

Hard disks never seem big enough. Even that huge new disk fills up in no-time. You need some space - but where do you start? With MOBZHunt, hunting down disk hogs is a snap!

Fragment Runner

Simple but surprisingly powerful tool to quickly try out .NET fragments in C#, VB.NET and JScript. Includes a library to compile and run .NET code fragments in your own applications.

MOBZPing

Displays the availability and response time of a series of hosts graphically. Very useful for tracking down connection problems, or simply monitoring a number of hosts simultaneously.

MOBZRuler

Very simple but surprisingly useful tool that displays a grid on screen. Great for lining up screen elements, measuring screen distances etc.

MOBZoom

A simple yet powerful zoom tool that supports saving captured images in a host of formats, including Windows icon files.

RegFind

Employ the full power of the .NET framework's regular expression engine to search for patterns in text files and directories.

RegName

A small yet flexible regular expression based file rename tool. Supports both a graphical and a command-line interface.

Shell Runner

A command shell tool for testing and running batch files, with a host of other options: timestamping output, saving error and output log files, marking error output in red, etc.

RunNET

Use .NET languages for scripting! Run .NET code (C#, VB.NET or whatever is installed on your machine) as a console application wihout generating an executable file on disk.

MOBZHash

MOBZHash is a command line tool to display MD5 and SHA hashes for files. It can also report files with identical hashes, which is useful in tracking down likely duplicates.

MOBZcript

A simple editor for cmd scripts. Press F5 to save and run your script using the regular cmd interpreter.

QuickCode.NET 2010

[DISCONTINUED] The premier productivity boosting add-in for Visual Studio 2005 through 2013. A complete rewrite of QuickCode.NET 2005, QuickCode.NET 2010 is now freeware. It features an all-new user interface and much-improved ease of use.

Online

Try our new Online tools - the .NET Format Tester, the Browser Information Tool, and Explain Regular Expression.

Code

See the code section for code samples and articles:

Using a FileSystemWatcher from PowerShell - How to set up a File System Watcher and monitor its events from PowerShell
A functional Retry pattern - A class to help you implement retries easily and consistently
A PowerShell wrapper for 7-Zip - A Powershell module that wraps the command-line functionality of 7za
jQuery Mosaic Plugin - A jQuery plugin to swap images in a mosaic
Harvesting Codeplex Statistics - Aggregating Codeplex statistics using VB.NET. (Note: obsoleted!)
A .NET Snippet Compiler - A class that compiles and runs code snippets.
Using constants for table and column names - How to generate a VB.NET source file with constants for database table and column names.
Transparent State Images in Tree Views - State images in tree view controls are second class citizens, because transparency is not supported. Here's how to get around that.
Console Process - A Console Process class for .NET 2.0 and 3.5. Runs console processes with a host of other options, such as an automatic timeout, 'near real-time' redirected I/O, etc.
Auto-Detecting Text Encoding - How to use the built-in Encoding.GetEncodings collection to detect the encoding of text files.
Text, Encodings, and .NET - How and when to use a text encoding when reading and writing text files in .NET.
Bug in .NET Command Line Arguments - Read about unexpected behavior in Environment.GetCommandLineArgs and how to get around it.
Events in C# and VB.NET - A look at the different ways in which C# and VB.NET handle event declarations - and how QuickCode.NET can help.
How To Kill a Process Tree - How to terminate a process and all processes started by that process.

Blog

And yes, there's a blog, too.

News

See Through Windows update

After 8 years there is now finally an update for See Through Windows. We call it our bombshell because it is still downloaded hundreds of times a month. Version 1.0.7 does not add any real new functionality, but was converted from .NET Framework 2.0 (!) to the new, shiny .NET 6.0. The primary reason for doing so is .NET 6's "self containment" capability, which publishes an program with all the .NET parts it needs. This eliminates the need to download the .NET Framework if you don't have that on your PC yet. And since .NET 2.0 is no longer installed by default on Windows 10 and up, this was almost always necessary. The result is a larger app (>50 MB) but that's also less of an issue these days ;-

Enjoy!

(January 15, 2022)

Code moved to Github

CodePlex is shutting down and that happens to be where we store the source code of all MOBZystems' tools. Fortunately, the folks at CodePlex made migrating to GitHub relatively easy, so that's what we've done.

(April 4, 2017)

MOBZircles

Just for fun: a hypnotic Javascript animation of dots traveling in straight lines, forming rotating circles. (Credit: stolen from Science Magazine!)

(March 23, 2017)

Measure your browser's animation speed

Using an extremely simple test, we can measure how many frames per second your browser manages to display by using requestAnimationFrame. This is relevant for animations and although the numbers for modern desktop browsers are all around 60 fps, phones and older devices may not achieve this number.

(April 6, 2016)

Using 7-Zip from Powershell

I love 7-Zip and I love Powershell. So I made a Powershell module to make using 7-Zip from the Powershell command line a little easier. Use New-7zArchive to create a new archive, Expand-7zArchive to extract archives, Get-7zArchive to list an archive's contents. And my personal favorite: New-7zSfx to create a self extracting executable with lots of customization options.

Enjoy!

(March 19, 2016)