The Custom Windows Toolbar - Underrated.

It is one of those features that never gets any hype. Much like the quick launch bar, windows allows you to add your own custom taskbar toolbars. Just

- right click the taskbar

- Toolbars -> New Toolbar

- Point to a folder and you're all set.

This video really spells out how to create a custom toolbar. Below is a shot of mine at the moment.

There is virtually no limit to the number of shortcuts. Sub folders are supported to allow for some simple grouping within a toolbar. It makes for a much better experience than the raw directory trees I usually have to think about navigating.

Only recently has it dawned on me how to use these toolbars to really save me some time. If you're a developer you may find these ideas useful if you haven't already implemented something similar.

Visual Studio

I'm always working on different solutions in visual studio. So many so that the "Start Page" no longer is that useful (even after tricking it to show me more recently opened solutions). Plus, I hate having extra tabs open. So the first thing I do after using the start page is close it. Well if you click a shortcut to a solution file no start page opens! Ha ha, finally I've thwarted that useless tab and its "developer news" that I never read. Instead I have my "vs" toolbar.

Command Prompts

All of those visual studio solutions usually have a console application or two in them. When I want to revisit these my directory navigating gets even crazier thanks to the /bin/Debug directories that are created by default. My solution is to create batch files of the form

cmd /k cd "C:\My Solutions\My Project\bin\Debug"

I talk about this idea in another post here. The end result is my "cmd" toolbar which opens up a command prompt at whatever starting directory I want.

Remote Desktops

I am constantly hoping on and off of machines for work. My rdp toolbar beats the snot out of Start -> All programs -> Accessories -> remote desktop connection. Instead I have a saved rdp for each machine one click away.

Other Ideas

NUnit

I don't do a ton of NUnit testing but I should. A little looking around shows that nunit-gui takes command line args. You could create shortcuts to your common test fixtures.

Multiple homepages

You can pass a url to the command line of most browsers. So you can have shortcuts to multiple sites in a toolbar.

I'm sure there are even more obvious uses that I've not thought of. Please share what you've come up with.