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Add Git Bash To Visual Studio Top Bar

There are numerous times when the Visual Studio built-in Git operations are not enough to handle the task you need to solve. Often the best way to use git is from the Git Bash. That is why you should add it to the Visual Studio top menu bar. This way the git bash will open in the correct place ready to execute your commands.

The following steps will guide you to achieve this:

From the menu bar select Tools -> External Tools…

Add a new External Tool. Give the path to your local Git bash installation and select $(SolutionDir) as the Initial directory. This way it will always open up in the currently opened solution directory.

Then go to View -> Toolbars -> Customize…

Once the window opened select the Commands tab and click Add Command…

Choose from the Tool the new External Command, the number may depend on the defined external commands.

After adding it to the Preview. Select it and move it down to the end.

That’s it! You should now have the option to open git bash directly from Visual Studio.

Creating a Wix Installer Patch from MSI

Creating patches for minor upgrades can be a real pain. The documentation for MsiMps.exe/PatchWiz.dll or WiX patching is missing a lot of detail and the error messages the tools give back are not enough. The responses and fixes are scattered on the internet or on the WiX mailing lists.

Jekyll Tag Generator for Github Pages

Long Qian has a great blog post about how to put tags on Github pages. While following the steps suggested by him, I saw, that the tag_generator script was written in python. Since I did not have a python compiler installed on my windows machine, I thought it should be easy to convert to a Powershell script.

Add Separator Line In System Tray Context-Menu Programatically

When creating a ContextMenu programatically, this class only accepts MenuItem items. Adding a Separator ( < Separator /> ) as one would do in XAML does not work. To add a separator line is actually quite easy, but you have to know to create a MenuItem with the parameter ”-“ as string.

Up and running!

Jekyll is up and running!