One of the dangers of pay-as-you-go, or utility services is that, 
if you don’t stop the service when you’re done using it, you’ll end up paying for continued use of that service. If you leave the lights on in your house while on a two-week vacation, you’re paying for two-weeks worth of 24-7 electricity. Forgetting can get expensive.
Utility computing has the same problem. Take Azure for instance. If, like me, you have developer or trial access to Azure (through MSDN or a trial subscription), you spin up instances for testing or demonstration, and then forget them, you might found yourself out of available hours in a flash. Worse, you might find yourself with a hefty bill for compute hours that ticked away while you were unaware.
Enter GreyBox, a great new open-source tool on Codeplex. GreyBox sits in your system tray, and is designed to be your “light sensor” for Azure. If you leave the lights on (as in, leave an instance deployed and/or running), GreyBox will let you know. Check it out at http://greybox.codeplex.com.
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