During my commute I thought it might be a good idea to brush up on my Windows Communication Foundation skills, so I wrote Ball. Picture your average office environment, many PCs all connected to the same network. Enter Ball, run it on a number of adjacent PCs, enter the hostname and hit 'Join'. Now you have two instances of Ball talking to each other over the network, when the Ball hits the edge of one screen it's going to disappear and reappear on the other PC's desktop.

You can keep connecting up new instances of Ball too, at time of going to press it had been successfully tested with three PCs. When you connect a third instance of Ball it will automatically discover any other instances connected to the connectee! :-)

Download the app and run the EXE, you will need .Net runtime installed. Do the same on another PC then on one of the instances enter the hostname of the other PC and click 'Join'. You can reorder the hosts in the listbox using the 'Up' and 'Down' buttons, get it how you want it and click 'Send'.

If you want ball to use a TCP/IP port other than 8000 then just pass the port number on the command line, but make sure your firewall allows traffic through on your selected port.

My advice is download the exe and have a play with it. If you want to see how it works, then take a look at the source code.

Ball (12kb)

Ball Source Code (28kb)

Labels: DOTNET, DOWNLOADS