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Recently, I discovered a neat feature in Visual Studio .NET 2008: when an Intellisense popup is visible, it usually obscures some part of your code. To see what's hidden underneath the popup window, press the Control key. This will make the popup transparent until you release the Control key - simply brilliant, and brilliantly simple.

Why can't I have that in Windows as well? And how hard can it be to write a little task bar application to make that work? The answer is: not very - primarily thanks to the .NET Framework. It took me all of two hours to get a basic functioning task bar app that makes the foreground window transparent when you press a hotkey, and turns it back to opaque when you press the hotkey again. Of course, making the transparency level and the hotkey configurable, creating an icon for the application, and adding an installer took me the rest of the day, but here it is: See Through Windows.