RUNit, CRASHit
Magister-Lex

http://www.magister-lex.at

Magister Lex is a guy you can't help but love. Even if you don't use his programs, drop by his site after a hard day of surfing and get your reality back in focus again. This guy is hilarious! And - and a very big 'and' - he's got his heart and most importantly his brain in the right place. And, unusual as it is for a member of the IT development community, he has a brain. A wonderful one. Check some of these details out from his 'inside RUNit' page:

which programming language/compiler do I use?
RUNit is written in C (no MFC)
I'm currently using MSVC 5.0
(Right there you know he's got to be ok.)

how does RUNit detect the mouse click?
when not running in 'whole screen mode', RUNit creates a window at the edge of the screen.
the window is created with the extended style WS_EX_TRANSPARENT, so you usually don't see much of it.
so 'detecting' the mouse click is nothing more than processing the WM_RBUTTONDOWN message in this case.

And so forth. He even goes on to reveal a secret hook in shell32.dll:

about the Change Icon dialog
because I didn't like the OleUIChangeIcon dialog, and because I'm lazy and risky I'm using the undocumented PickIconDialog, which is also used in the shortcut properties dialog when changing the icon. it is exported from shell32.dll by ordinal 62.

What more can you ask for?

As to what RUNit and CRASHit are, well RUNit is a serious program and CRASHit, if that is possible, is an even more serious program. RUNit gives you a kind of X-Windows right click menu opportunity which is very welcome in these days of the mentally debilitating MS Windows taskbar and CRASHit simply crashes your entire system with any application you choose as the culprit (we haven't checked this one out yet, but suspect Andi is sending bogus WM_TIMER messages to the window of your choice - MS Windows, unbelievably enough, does not check for the validity of the function pointer you send along in its default window procedure).

The guy thinks and does all the right things at the right times. He hates install programs. He's been there as a user, and he knows enough to understand how much havoc they wreak on a system. He hates the Registry (a bit too much for our taste, but you can't have everything). And he packs his system hook DLL inside his executable, dumps it on your disk at runtime, hooks up with it programmatically, then deletes it from your disk on program exit. Talk about a rabbit out of a hat! Whether it's programmatically difficult or not is hardly the point: the point is he dares try it.

Ok, are there bugs in RUNit? Sure - read the comments page and see for yourself. Menus won't cascade, they won't wrap, and his INI file suffers from being in the same location - your Windows directory - no matter what. That being said, know that RUNit will undoubtedly work fine for most people exactly as is. And that even so, having another mind out there like Andi, or Magister Lex as he sarcastically calls himself, is good for IT. Really good indeed.