Windows Screensaver Update

My Windows "Random" photos screensaver code hasn't really been significantly touched for many years now, but as it's working really well on a daily basis on my home PCs, I thought I'd add it to GitHub.

You can use this URL to clone: https://github.com/jscott7/PhotosScreensaver.git
(A wiki has also been started: https://github.com/jscott7/PhotosScreensaver/wiki)

As part of the process I performed a bit of a clean up. It's OK, this is a very small project!

First, the settings have an option to change the delay between photos updating, unfortunately while you could change this it wasn't being used.

The settings for the root folder for photos and delay are saved in the registry, I'm using the key HKCU\SOFTWARE\JscoPhotoScreenSaver

public static void SaveSetting(string name, object value)
{
   var key = Registry.CurrentUser.CreateSubKey("SOFTWARE\\JscoPhotoScreenSaver");
   if (value != null)
   {
       key.SetValue(name, value);
   }
}

Then save the photos path to this key with:

SettingsUtilities.SaveSetting("photopath", filePathBox.Text);

To load back use:

object rootPath = SettingsUtilities.LoadSetting("photopath");

There was an inefficiency with the loading of photo files. I was duplicating this for each window. Not a problem for single monitors but it's unnecessary for multiple monitor setups. Fortunately this was easy to fix by moving the logic to the App.xaml.cs file.

Next, to install, the exe built by the project needs to be renamed to PhotosScreensaver.scr. You then right-click on it and select Install. I added a post-build step to the project to automatically perform this rename.

I also made a few tweaks to follow the MS Naming guidelines

Finally, I made use of string interpolation which is new from C# 6. Previously I used a StringBuilder to generate a debug log. This was:

log.Append("Show").Append(window.Width).Append("-").Append(window.Height).Append("-").Append(window.Left).Append("-").AppendLine(window.Top.ToString()); 

And now, with string interpolation it's much cleaner:

log.Append($"Show {window.Width}-{window.Height}-{window.Left}-{window.Top}");