Have you ever wanted to send a text message or maybe even make a telephone call from a command prompt of a Windows machine? If you have no idea what I am talking about this this is probably not the article for you. If however you hear this and you immediately think of alerts or processes they happen that you need to know about as a text message or maybe a telephone call then you may want to read on.

There is a service on the webs of thought called Twilio. These guys have put together a set of web based APIs that use simple communication methods to enable some powerful stuff at very cost effective prices. Because I have a need for notifications like this I decided to write a small .net application that leverage this API from the command line of a Windows machine - I call this project twiCLI.

Using a few simple command line switches you can send text messages, use a text to speech engine and place a telephone call or even play an MP3 file when the caller picks up the line. If you are interested in this sort of thing check out the project page here and give me some feedback about how this could be made more useful to you.