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Visual Studio Command Prompt Toolbar Button

Of the billion toolbar buttons that Visual Studio 2005 includes, I couldn't find one to open a command prompt to the project directory. This is a must-have for us command-line SubVersion users. Luckily, a quick Google search turned up this post (its actually the comment from Barry Gervin that I credit). Updated for VS 2005:

From the Tools -> External Tools... menu, click Add, and fill in:

Title: Command Prompt &Here
Command: C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
Arguments: /k ""C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" x86
Initial Directory: $(ProjectDir)

Note the Title is important only because I wanted to use the letter 'H' as my shortcut key since it is close to the 'T', and unused on the default Tools menu. This enables the very easy one-handed keystroke ALT+T,H.

I then went to Tools->Customize..., selected Tools from the Categories, then found "External Command 3" (there were 2 other tools already registered in VS) in the Commands section, and dragged it up to my toolbar. Right-click on the new button on the toolbar, select Default Style, then Change Button Image, and choose the square (its a good starting point). Using Edit Button Image... I drew a crude "C:".

Comments

Check out http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/CommandBar.asp too
James Johnson - January 10, 2006 06:50am
Here's a page that shows how to add a shortcut to launch the Visual Studio Command Window from Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008
http://dnchannel.blogspot.com/2007/08/shortcut-launch-visual-studio-command.html
Lukkha Coder - August 31, 2007 11:10am