Nevermind that link I put up. It’s rubbish for my purposes. I didn’t really have my heart set on making a Vista gadget so much as simply making an alternate means for somebody to open up a Vista box for ICMP echo response. So I loaded up a copy of Visual Basic, learned a couple things, and brewed up a simple application that tests for a firewall rule of a particular name, then allows the user to open up ICMP (if the rule isn’t already there) or close it off (by deleting the rule). All done through janktastical wshShell.run legerdemain. At first I used wshShell.exec (as it allows access to stdout), but I suppose I know better now.

I’ve got some testing to do, particularly in regards to the “publish” mechanism in Visual Basic. I’ve never used that beast before, usually just brewing up remedial scripts for use on Apache web servers, so all this business regarding signing and means of distribution are totally foreign to me. Once I’m satisfied that it works properly on systems other than my laptop, insert some means of LARTing fools that try to run it on pre-Vista boxen, and narrow down precisely which hosts I intend to let ping it (the Sonic.net latency tester and technical support IPs being obvious choices), I’ll put a little finishing polish on the text, and…

Boy is it easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. The things I’ll do to help little old ladies not have to do this.

p.s. – the escape characters in Visual Basic are retarded.