"12 Folder" From Here!

Here's my cheap inexpensive tribute to Raymond (no, not you Raymond, the OTHER Raymond that had a piano in his office while working on DX1, ahh the good ol' days!).

I got tired of opening a command prompt and manually navigating to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN folder each time I wanted to poke around (i.e. usually run some form of stsadm or psconfig command) so I whipped up a registry file that I deploy on all of my SharePoint machines.  Nothing fancy, but useful to me and perhaps you, too.

Save the following as a .REG file and import it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\Open12Folder]
@="12 Folder"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\Open12Folder\Command]
@="cmd.exe /k cd \"%%CommonProgramFiles%%\\microsoft shared\\web server extensions\\12\\BIN\""
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\OpenNew]
@="Command Prompt"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\OpenNew\Command]
@="cmd.exe /k cd %1"

Now can I right click on an open explorer folder or any desktop shell folder (My Computer, My Network Places, My Documents) and simply select "12 Folder" from the context menu and I have a command prompt at my disposal waiting for me in the \BIN directory.  As you probably noticed, you also get the "Command Prompt" here for free, too.

Yes, I know I could have just added this directory to my path, but that would require me right clicking on My Computer... selecting Properties... clicking the Advanced tab... clicking the Environment Variables button... selecting the Path variable... clicking the Edit button... blah blah blah, I'm already tired just typing it... :)  The shell rules, let's leave it at that.