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
Hi Nic,
I’m interested in programming win7 jump lists, but I did not find a good example how to program it. Would it be possible to get the source code of VBoxLaunch?
Regards,
Chris
Hi Nic
Looks like a really useful tool, however when I try to run more than 1 VM simultaneously only 1 will run, any suggestions how I could run more than 1. I sometimes have labs that require 3 VM’s to be running simultaneously.
Many thanks in advance
Robert
Hi Nic
please ignore my Last post, after further investigation the reason was that I had copied the VM’s and didn’t clone them.
best Regards
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Is it compatible with Windows 8.1? It creates all the icons successfully but none of them actually do anything 😕
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