Three Is It

Because two isn't enough and four is just too many

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
Mark Twain

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Brad Butts is a .NET developer and architect. He is married with children and enjoys reading, working out, and genealogy is his five minutes of spare time.

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The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.

© Copyright 2008

<< Use the User File to Resolve Reference Problems | TechEd08 Notes: Day 3 >>

Command Prompt Here for Visual Studio 2008

You can't do sufficient .NET development without going to the command line at some point. Not every tool that you need can be found or worked from the IDE. There are too many tools to mention (at least in this post) and they tend to change from Visual Studio release to Visual Studio release, but if you're interested, I would recommend starting with Mike Wood's series of posts on Visual Studio 2005 SDK tools: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Most of the time when working with these utilities, you need to navigate to a particular directory and work on a particular file. And, of course, it's not enough to open the vanilla command shell (cmd.exe), because the paths to the .NET utilities haven't been mapped in the vanilla shell. You could open your Start Menu, navigate to the Visual Studio 200X folder and somewhere within that folder launch the shortcut to the Visual Studio 200X Command Shell; then, at that command prompt navigate to the folder and file you want to work...and 50 keyboard clicks later actually start doing your work. That's lame.

Well, some time ago, the effervescent Scott Hanselman offered up a neat little power toy for adding a Visual Studio 200X Command Prompt Here context menu option when you right-click any folder in Windows Explorer.

Scott offered solutions for Visual Studio 2003 and 2005; however, lately, I've been doing a fair amount of work in Visual Studio 2008. Where is my power toy for that? Having found no other offerings for such a power toy for 2008, I decided to make my own. So, I took Scott's solution and carefully and meticulously replaced all the 5s with 8s. Yes, sheer brilliance, I know. Well, it was slightly more complicated than that: you do have to change the filepath to the place where vsvars32.bat lives within your Visual Studio 2008 install, but other than that, it was a pretty simple modification.

I don't know much about the INF extension, but I do like the fact that it registers the power toy in the Add/Remove Programs control panel. That's nice, because should you mess up modifying the INF file, you can always remove it and start over. I've attached my INF file to this post.