Wednesday, April 09, 2008 10:46 PM
This project is a basic time tracking tool which sits quietly in the system tray until needed. Originally published in a Coding 4 Fun article (like most of my projects!), this has evolved somewhat over time as I've used it for my own day-to-day time tracking needs. It's still far from perfect, but hopefully at least useful.
Use the Tool
ClickOnce Installer
Setup the Tool
When you first launch the tool, there isn't much you can do with it. Without projects defined, it just sits in your tray.
To get started with it, right-click the icon (the clock face to the left in the above screenshot). In the menu, there are three enabled commands. I'll let you figure out Exit, but the other two may need a little explanation. The Change Project command is a sub-menu to allow you select or add a project.
A project is nothing but a simple name identifying some work to do. In this simple application you can't create subprojects, or even enter details about a project. You can create a project and set whether or not it's active (not on this dialog though).
After clicking OK, you can start clocking in and out. Simply double-click the icon to clock in. Double-click again to clock out. You can hover your mouse over the icon to see details when you are clocked in:
Now that you've created a project and clocked some time, you can see summaries of your time. Right-click the tray icon and click View Time Details.
The Project Time Entries dialog shows all time entries for a given time period. You can drill into projects and dates. The Show zero-hours checkbox is useful if you have many projects defined. If, in a given time period, there are no hours for a project, it won't show if Show zero-hours is checked. The Projects tab lets you delete or deactivate projects, and the Maintenance tab lets you hand-edit time entries in case you left yourself clocked in overnight or something like that.
That's really it! It's definitely basic, and should give you an easy way to track time. If you need more features, feel free to add them or find a better tool! If you modify the code, let me know. If it's something other people would want maybe I'll roll the changes in (with credit to you of course).
Learn how it works (for developers)
Download the source code
Read more about it from the MSDN Coding 4 Fun article.