I virtualized an application I needed to run at a certain time of the day, and the rest of the time it should not run. I could do this via the Scheduler, but why not create a tool which gives a good overview and can make those schedules for me?

Here's an easy way to schedule your layers to activate any time or any date you want.

My sincere thanks goes out to Riva11, who, with his busy schedule (as you see in all the posts he makes here), was able to test this pretty fine program.

He showed me that Italy is the only country who uses a dot instead of a colon in their time notation. Thank you Riva11.

How to use it:

Open Layer Times and choose the layer you want to schedule from the dropdown.

You can choose 2 ways of scheduling: daily basis or date basis.

On the left you see the day scheduler, you can pick any day you want to stop and start a layer.

When you pick a day, the date option will be disabled as it is of no use anymore.

If you look at the picture you'll see how it can be set up this way.

You can also choose a date-based schedule, just pick a date when the Layer should start and pick a date that the Layer should stop.

When you change the time at the top, the time at the bottom will also change to ensure you don't set the deactivate time before the activate time. So, first change the activate time and then change the deactivate time.

If you activate or deactivate the scheduled layer manually, Layer Times will detect this and won't try to activate or deactivate the layer.

When you've made your settings just click start, and the program minimizes to the tray area.

Click on the icon in the tray (next to the clock) to view the program again and stop the scheduler. See it change when you start the scheduler -- it shows if it is stopped or started.

The scheduler checks every 10 seconds to see if it has to deactivate or activate a layer. This is done to ensure minimum system impact. Changing the amount of seconds on the scheduler doesn't have any use. Layer Times only looks at the minutes and hours.

The settings of each layer are stored in <layernumber>\LayerAttr in the registry.

This means that when you export your layer and import it on your machine or someone's computer, you can use Layer Times without the need to create the schedules again.

When you make a change in your schedule, don't forget to click "save" before you choose "start." This goes for every layer, if you change a layer's schedule, click "save" before you edit another Layer.

If you click on Layer Times in the tray with your left mouse button, Layer Times will be available again. If you click with your right mouse button, it will minimize back to the tray.

It is also possible to create a log file with the actions. Just check the "Create Log" menu item and it will create a file in the app direcory called "Layer Times.log" every time a scheduled action occurs. Pay attention to the size of the log file, Layer Times will not do that for you.

If you click on the question mark at the top right, you'll get an overview of your schedules.

It is also possible to let Layer Times start at Windows startup, just adapt theis shortcut so Layer Times gets a command equal to:

C:\Program Files\LayerTimes\LayerTimes.exe" /A

The /A stands for automatic.

Copy the shortcut to your startup folder, and viola, it starts every time you logon to Windows.

Last but not least, I had to create an setup (MSI) as the Layer Times depends on the mscomct2.ocx, that is the part that shows you the calendar and the time.

As you know, MSI is open source, so you can see what is in the setup to see it only installs the necessary files.

Version v1.2:

NEW: Ok, I know I can't hold you back not to virtualize Layer Times, but I made sure you can't Schedule Layer Times when it is Virtualized, it would defeat the purpose of the program.
NEW: I forgot to add an option to clear a Layer Schedule, that is build in now, just pick you Layer and click the '*' on the left side of it.
FIXED: The Schedule of the Layer was not showed properly, it didn't show the days it was scheduled.
FIXED: Check if there is a newer version.

Have Fun, FrankB