Scott Hanselman

Today's Favorite Right-Clicks - ClipPath, RunAsLimitedUser, and Clean Sources

December 11, 2004 Comment on this post [7] Posted in ASP.NET | XML | Tools
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I loves me the right-click. I right-click in my sleep. Any utility that lets me right-click to do something that is a hassle, is my new best friend. Oh, and not crashing Explorer.exe is a requirement.

Here's my three favorites today (there are others for later):

  • RunAsLimitedUser - Jonas Blunck does it again. The only guy who writes more stuff is Jeff Key. Anyway, RunAsLimitedUser will launch an application using an account that has a limited set of permissions on my box. It's different than the shift-right-click RunAs...which lets you run as any user. If you're doing development in a restricted or very restricted environment, it's the tool. Slick.
  • ClipPath - Adds a context-menu to put the current path from Explorer in your clipboard. Even better, you can chosse from \'s or /'s, as well as Outlook friendly <file:///http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/whatever>. Why wasn't this in Windows already?
  • Clean Sources - "This Application does one thing. It adds an explorer shell menu to folders that when selected will recursively delete the contents of the bin, obj and setup folders. If you have a .NET project that you wish to share with some one, this is useful to remove the unnecessary stuff from the folder before you zip it up and send it off."

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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December 10, 2004 5:19
Hmm. Clean Sources looks interesting. One thing on my "to-do" list is to figure out how to send a non-Vault user a project that I keep in Vault (www.sourcegear.com), and then have it behave nicely when they open it in VS.Net instead of throwing off warning messages about not being able to find source control binding info etc.
December 10, 2004 7:59
I think you have to open the cproj and sln and remove anything that says "SCC*" this or that?

http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/korbyp/PermaLink.aspx/623146c4-38d6-4ad9-89f1-a2e561f7cad2
December 10, 2004 11:19
Looks like you're right. Maybe clean sources could build this in. Maybe it's already got it - haven't checked yet. From what I've read now it seems to be an oversight on MS's part that projects can be nicely unbound from source control.

Korby's blog also mentions this: http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2003/12/17/44209.aspx It looks like he's one of the guys who works on this part of VS.

Also a discussion on one of Scot Watermask's previous posts: http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2003/08/04/9233
December 10, 2004 19:42
great tools,thank you
December 10, 2004 19:58
As far as removing the files... why did VS decide that clean is only good for Visual C++ developers? I can't believe that they would not think that it is a good idea for everyone. I think that I will try and write an extension for VS that brings that functionality for everyone.....
January 14, 2005 18:06
Speaking of right-click explorer extensions, you should take a look at this sample:

http://blogs.xceedsoft.com/plantem/#a79c0a728-6d72-4b97-9973-74333e4df44d
August 22, 2005 6:22
I created "Clean Sources Plus", which adds..

- removes source code bindings
- removes the user prefs files (.suo, etc)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000368.html

It's otherwise identical to Omar's code-- great concept!

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.