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Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

Not just Linux books

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Although it’s titled Free On-line Linux Technical Books and Tutorials, there’s lots here of interest to Windows folk as well:

Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in C++ Volume 1 and Volume 2 - Practical Programming
C# Essentials
Visual Basic Essentials

Posted in Computers, Software Development | No Comments »

How to get Vista to show the “Command Prompt Here” on a Folder List

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

For many years, on many PCs running various versions of Windows NT, 2000 and XP, applying the “Command Prompt Here” Powertoy was one of the first things I would do to customize the vanilla Windows environment (i.e. make it usable). Right-click a folder, select “DOS Prompt Here” or “Command Prompt Here” from the context menu, and voila, a DOS box opens, set to the folder you clicked on:

I was happy to find the same feature already baked into Windows Vista: hold down the shift key, right-mouse click on any folder in the view pane, then select “Open Command Window Here” from the context menu:

But try the same trick on a folder in the Folder Tree, sorry, the command’s not there:

For some reason, in their wisdom the Microsoft UI engineers chose to omit the command from this particular menu.

Quite by chance, I discovered that the choice is available on the File menu in Vista, but it’s not invoked in the same way: instead, select a folder in folder list, hold down the shift key then left-click (i.e. normal click) the File menu:

Vista then displays “Open Command Window Here” at the top of the menu. Okay, happy to have it back, even if it’s in a place I didn’t expect…

Posted in Computers, Windows Vista | No Comments »

What did I just edit?

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

I checked out some code files from Razor (don’t ask, we use an old CM system), created a couple of new ones, now I want to quickly double-check which of the thousands of files in our source tree are the ones I checked out or created (don’t ask, we use an old CM system), so I can check the changes back in and introduce the new files (if I forget, guess who gets the wooden spoon for breaking the build):

So fire up a DOS prompt and type in:

C:\path to my code\>dir *.cpp *.h *.vcproj /b /s /a:-r > \usafipd\updated_files.txt

This says “list all of the code files and Visual Studio project files from here on down that are writeable (i.e. not locked by Razor), then dump the results to a file in case there are hundreds of filenames to review.

This gives me a file, updated_files.txt, containing a nice list of all the .cpp, .h and .vcproj (Visual Studio project) files I checked out (i.e. made writeable).

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