I’m a big fan of Windows 7 and it’s new features, one of those being the Jump Lists. I’m also a big fan of VirtualBox for my development, testing and isolation needs, at least I can run a virtual x64 machine and connect to it for kernel mode debugging, which is something I can’t do with Virtual PC.
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)
History
- 0.0.1-Initial release
- 0.0.2-Quick and dirty hack to fix up for VirtualBox 3.2.0 release
Why not just creating a shotcut to execute this?
VBoxManage start
Nice one. It actually does not work when you have a dot (.) in the name of the Virtual Machine like I have. “Version 4.2.0″ for example.
I changed icon to original one (maybe you have other for copyright issues, understandable). I dragged it to taskbar instead of start menu, that also works ok.
THANK YOU! Very Slick! I’ll confirm that this is working for me on Windows 7 Professional x64 with VirtualBox 3.2.8. Good stuff, thanks again!
Nice!
(Win7 Pro, sp1 / VirtualBox 4.1.4)
Hmmm, I have x64 Win7 Pro SP1 and Vbox 4.1.4 and NOT working for me at all. I am not using a default path; using a 2nd HDD (X drive) and the path is \program files (x86)\VirtualBox\
I copied the binary file to the VirtualBox install directory and regardless of how I run the program it crashes instantly
Hi, sorry it’s not working for you, unfortunately this was a quick little tool that I created and it is only intended to work with the default paths. Sorry about this.