AgentServerObjects

Windows includes this bizarre feature called 'AgentServerObjects'. These are little animated characters that fly around the screen, making announcements and doing quite odd and quirky things.

They don't get used very much, in fact it is hard to see what you could use them for. But they're certainly fun.

Merlin looks like this:



and:



In order to run this example I generated the interop dll in 'c:\'. Run tlbimp like this (more on Interop introduction): C:\>set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin C:\>tlbimp c:\WINDOWS\msagent\agentsvr.exe

The code to make this dude fly around your screen is: import sys sys.path.append('C:\\') # or wherever your interop dll is

import clr clr.AddReference("AgentServerObjects.dll") from AgentServerObjects import AgentServerClass

a = AgentServerClass id, rest = a.Load("merlin.acs") ch = a.GetCharacter(id)

ch.SetSize(128,128) ch.MoveTo(0, 0, 0) ch.Show(0) ch.MoveTo(600, 100, 2000) ch.Play("Announce") ch.MoveTo(300, 150, 1000) ch.Play("Think") ch.Play("Search") ch.Play("Congratulate") ch.Hide(0)

Cool...

More details here, and some example C# here.

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