Nic's Blog » Jump List http://nicbedford.co.uk Where my thoughts on life, the universe and everything trickle onto the internet… Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:59:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 VBoxLaunch http://nicbedford.co.uk/2010/02/18/vboxlaunch/ http://nicbedford.co.uk/2010/02/18/vboxlaunch/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:48:58 +0000 Nic http://nicbedford.co.uk/?p=330 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)

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