Late last night I was copying a group of large files for an application deployment over to a server that exists on a very shaky and temperamental wireless internet connection.  My VPN connection would constantly drop, at least every 3 to 4 minutes.  A continuous ping is my friend here as it lets me know as soon as the server stops responding, but it's kind of a pain to have to resize my windows to see the command prompt all the time.

So I got to thinking about Scott Hanselman's post about apps that "Light Up" on Windows 7, and Scott's post about Jeff Key's Taskbar Meters. Wouldn't it be great to have a simple ping utility that would let me see the response time and timeouts via the Windows 7 taskbar?  Of course it would.

After 30 minutes or so (I know, but I had to get a drink of water), I had this little app thrown together, and so I have named it WPingF:

And of course the entire purpose of this is the taskbar status:

The indicator is the roundtrip time / the specified timeout, and it will turn red when there's a response timeout.

It's not much to look at right now, but it works.  I'm going to add a couple more features to it (such as saving the host names in the drop down in a local xml for thumb drive deployment), and stick the code out there for anyone who cares to abuse it.

(BTW - the WPF designer in VS 2010 is quite nice.  So much better than having to switch over to Blend or do everything in angle brackets)