Network Switcher Help

First of all, please make sure that you met all the requirements for Network Switcher.

To install Network Switcher, all you have to do is unpack the compressed zip package to any location of your liking, ie: “C:\Program Files\Network Switcher”, but that's all up to you; now, just fire up “Network Switcher.exe”. Network Switcher does not use a setup like approach cause there's no need to make any system-wide changes for it to work.

The first time you run Network Switcher, you won't be able to really use it before configuring some important settings. So, just open up the settings dialog or try to add a profile and you'll be notified that you need to configure some important settings and the dialog will be automatically opened.

Although some of the settings are really straightforward, I'll explain them all in the following lines.

• Start Network Switcher with main window hidden
  If this option is marked, every time you run Network Switcher, the Manage Profiles window will be hidden and to access it, you need to double-click the notification area icon or right click the notification area icon and select “Manage Profiles” menu item.
• Start Network Switcher automatically with Windows
  If this option is marked, Network Switcher will be automatically executed every time you start a Windows session.
• Exit Network Switcher upon main window closing
  If this option is marked, whenever you click the top-right “X” button in the main window, Network Switcher will be terminated instead of hiding itself and remain in the notification area.

This section settings are the most important ones for Network Switcher to work properly without any errors. Configure them carefully!

• Network Connections folder name
  This is the folder name where Windows displays all your available network cards. Normally, this would be “Network Connections” (without the quotes), but if you are using a localized or a non XP version of Windows, you need to find out what Windows as called to this folder on your system. You need to know what to look for as I can't help you on that, all I can tell you is that this folder, is located in the Control Panel. Just copy-paste the folder name as we need it exactly the way it's called.
• Enable and Disable Verbs
  After finding out the Network Connections folder, open it up and then right-click any of the network cards. The top most menu item is probably “Enabled” if the connection is disabled or “Disabled” if the connection is already enabled, this are the verbs we need and, as in the previous setting, may be different that the ones I stated here if you are using a localized version of Windows.
  However, there's a tiny “problem” which does not allow us to simply use the name as it is on the menu item. For now, let's just say that some connection is enabled. You need to select that connection and open the “File” menu (do not right-click on the connection, you must use the “File” menu). After that, you'll see the “Disable” verb; note the underline under “b”. Our final disable verb will be “Disa&ble” (without the quotes). Now, disable that connection and do the same thing and you'll see that the “Enable” verb is in fact “Enable” which will make our final enable verb “En&able” (once again without the quotes). Basically, you have to find out which letter is underlined and put the ”&” character before that letter.

Please note, that all of these settings, are case-sensitive.

It's not part of this documentation to explain what proxies are and their purpose, so, if you don't know what to do here, just leave “Direct connection to the Internet” selected.

Network Switcher does not deal with proxies directly, this settings are just means to use them in plugins. Every plugin will be able to read this settings if they need/want to. This way, every plugin that happens to deal with proxies, won't need to have their own configuration for the proxy server and can easily use the settings configured in Network Switcher.

Creating, removing and modifying profiles in Network Switcher is very easy and straightforward.

After clicking the “Add” button to create a new profile, the very first thing you'll have to do is to name your profile. After this, a new dialog will pop-up which allows you to configure up to 2 connections per profile, named, Connection 1 and Connection 2. Just so you know, you can't start configuring Connection 2 unless you've already configured Connection 1, just to keep things neat.
The interface is much like the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) properties of Windows.

To configure a connection you must first select it from the drop down list, otherwise, you won't be able to configure anything. To enable the connection you just selected just check “Enable Connection”. But if you want to disable a connection, just select it and uncheck “Enable Connection” and the network card will be enabled or disabled according to your profile.
Now, all you have to do is configure the TCP/IP settings for the connection you selected to your liking. I believe that if you were interested in Network Switcher in the first place and decided to take it for a spin, then you know what you are doing and don't need any kind of help on the TCP/IP settings.

What plugins do is to execute some functions, which we will call actions. Any plugin will have at least one action but can have as many actions as it needs and you are the one that chooses which actions you want to be executed when the profile you are configuring is applied. For instance, Internet Explorer Proxy plugin that comes with the base package of Network Switcher has two actions, EnableProxy and DisableProxy. As the name says, one of the actions will enable the proxy server in Internet Explorer as the other will disable it. It's up to you to choose which ones it should be executed.
Some other plugins might have more than 2 actions and for the plugin to work properly you may need to select more than one action per profile to do what the plugin intends to. Network Switcher has no means to check if the action you selected can be executed if another action is also selected, so, know exactly what every plugin action do before selecting them or the final results might not be exactly what you wanted. One thing that Network Switcher provides in the configuration of the plugins actions to countermeasure this little issue (or the plugin may need some feature like this), is to select the order in which the actions are to be executed. However, note that the Internet Explorer Proxy plugin must only have one of the actions selected, otherwise, both will be executed and you may end up with the wrong settings.

Removing a profile is as easy as select it from the drop down list in the main application window and click the “Remove” button. You'll get a confirmation dialog before really deleting the profile just so you don't accidentally remove the wrong profile.

To modify any profile, just select it from the drop down list in the main application window and click the “Edit” button. The dialog that will popup to modify profiles is exactly the same as the one to create profiles, the only difference is that the dialog will be populated with all the values from the profile you want to modify. You just have to make the changes you want the same way you did in the first place when creating the profile.

Unless the plugin's author has any specific installation instructions to make the plugin work, you'll probably just need to place the plugin DLL file into the “plugins” folder located under the Network Switcher location where you unpacked the downloaded zip package. The plugin will then be available inside Network Switcher while adding or editing a profile. Although, if you installed new plugins while Network Switcher was running, it is most likely you'll have to restart it to load the new installed plugins.

Due to the development of Network Switcher being discontinued, this section of the help page will not be finished.