Ruler

While my life is busy being turned upside down by the SSIS scripts I’ve been testing, let me take this chance to fill you in on a cool new tool I found for Windows (I promise to get back to the SQL Server Compact Edition stuff soon!).

This tool is very cool, no matter what you happen to do for a living, be it a web designer, programmer, or even a housewife who loves graphics. It’s Ruler, it displays a simple ruler on the screen like so:

Here you can see I’ve placed the ruler over yesterday’s blog entry. The ruler can be resized by simply holding the mouse cursor over the edge, clicking and dragging as you would resize a normal window.

Pressing the spacebar will flip the ruler from horizontal to vertical. Right click on the ruler to access the menu options. You can control the opacity, and set it to “Stay on Top” mode among other things.

It also supports “nudging” via the keyboard when you need to place or size it exactly. The arrow keys will move the ruler five pixels, CTRL+Arrow moves it one pixel, and CTRL+Shift+Arrow will resize the ruler.

This delightful little tool can be found for free at http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/Ruler/. You can even download the source, in case you want to add your own enhancements. It consists of 3 simple files that don’t even have to be installed, just unzip and place in a directory.

I love this thing, I have often wished I had a pixel ruler and this has found a permanent place in my toolbox. Kudos to Jeff Key (http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/) for writing this gem.