I’ve played with Subversion and Team Foundation Server at home, but having the repositories locally doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence in case of hard disk failure (even though I have backups on my WHS box).
So now I have decided to experiment with Git, and to that end I have uploaded the source for my System Restore Explorer and EMV Card Browser projects on to github.
I can’t guarantee they are in a completely buildable state, but I have included the VS2010 solutions and WiX projects. If and when I do get some time I will certainly update the Git repositories and make sure they are in a buildable state.
So for anyone interested please take a look here:
]]>Anyway, as much as I’d like to see this actually built into the Windows VirtualBox GUI, I suspect it’s not high priority for the Sun developers and I’m far too lazy to setup a dev environment with all the pre-requrisites to actually build VirtualBox myself. So here’s a little hack work-around I created, to slightly improve the VirtualBox experience from the Windows 7 start menu.
If you’d like to make use of my small little app, then please feel free to download it from here, just extract the binary to your VirtualBox install folder, create a shortcut to VBoxLaunch.exe and drag it into your start menu. The first time you run VBoxLaunch it will query all of your VirtualBox VM’s and create a custom jump list for them, you should then be able to start your selected VM directly, without the need to launch the VirtualBox GUI each time.
This tool requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5, should already exist on Windows 7 
and was developed and tested on Windows 7 x64 (but there is no reason why it shouldn’t work on 32bit Windows 7 too)
I’ve made use of the excellent AlphaVSS library which exposes the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) API’s as native .net objects. I’ve been having a few issues accessing these in Vista x64, but I have tested this in Vista x86 and it appears to be working ok. Again feedback is welcome via comments.
Anyway to my surprise it had been consumed by Vista’s System Restore feature, I had installed a couple of applications, decided they weren’t for me and un-installed them. Each of these actions had created a new system restore point. After figuring out how to get access to the “C:System Volume Information” folder (I don’t really recommend you do this) I saw that some of these system restore points were up to 3GB each in size, but I couldn’t find any way to delete them.
I googled a little and some people seemed to suggest that the Disk Cleanup Wizard would remove them, but it didn’t work for me, in fact the only way I reclaimed over 40GB of disk space was to disable (which does remove the data) and then re-enable system restore.
But what I really wanted was a way to delete individual restore points and I couldn’t find anything already out there, so I set about developing a solution myself.
The more I researched the more advanced I thougt I could make this tool, so currently it does what I first wanted, allows you to delete individual restore points. But I plan to add functionality that will allow you to mount a restore point and browse it’s contents (hence it’s name System Restore Explorer)
It’s not really ready for public consumption yet, but I am planning to upload a beta copy here tomorrow, and hopefully I can get some feedback
Update
Well, as promised here is a beta for people to play with, use this at your own risk, if it happens to trash your entire computer it’s not my fault! This program requires .net framework 3.5 and has been tested on Vista only.
]]>C:Program Files (x86)BreakPoint SoftwareHex Workshop v5>regsvr32 hwext64.dll]]>