A Flexible Windows Workspace Saving and Restoring Utility

The aim of this paper is to present an implemented solution to the problem of saving and restoring the state of a Windows workspace (a collection of running user applications and the characteristics of their opened windows). The motivation for this application came from the need of a tool capable of saving and restoring the state of a set of applications. The existing solutions are not tailored for the use case of saving and restoring a workspace exactly as it looked at the time of saving, i.e. do not try to restore an application to the same screen location where the application was located when the saving was done. With this knowledge we proceeded with our plan to create solution that restores the context of an application (to a certain degree) and places that application at its original screen position. When scanning a workspace we iterate through all the windows created by user applications. For each window, we record the window’s position, size, and some properties of the application which owns the respective window (i.e. its executable path and the command line with which the application was launched). Using this information we can restore later an application and thus an entire workspace to the original state. In this paper we present our method of solving this problem coupled with the design and implementation of an open-source software that puts our solution into action.