Roland Weigelt

Emaroo is a free utility for browsing most recently used (MRU) file lists of programs like Visual Studio, VS Code, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator and more. Quickly open files, jump to their folder in Windows Explorer, copy them (and their path) to the clipboard - or run your own tools on files and folders with custom actions!

• Download Emaroo on www.roland-weigelt.de/emaroo
• Get ready-to-use custom actions on GitHub, e.g.
  • Open a Visual Studio project/solution in a specific version of Visual Studio
  • Open the Visual Studio developer command line
  • Open a file or folder in Visual Studio Code
  • Open a folder in Git Bash or Git GUI
  • Attach a file to a new email in Outlook
• Learn how to write your own custom actions in a quick step-by-step guide.

About this Release

The recent release of Visual Studio Code 1.26 brought a couple of changes that made it disappear from Emaroo. With VS Code being one of the tools and applications that I constantly launch from Emaroo, that is obviously a bad thing.

Fortunately I had a more or less finished version 4.2 that was just waiting for an important reason for a release.

Other release notes:

• Changed: The settings for Show hidden and Show missing now work across tabs and are persisted when exiting Emaroo.
• Improved: Reduced flicker when changing tabs.
• Fixed: On some systems a black line appeared at the bottom of the VS2017 tab.
• Workaround: In case the MRU list for Visual Studio 2017 shows only old items (or none at all), you can now switch the strategy how the MRU items are determined. See the ReadMe in the ZIP file for more information.
  

A big Thank you! to Darren Schroeder for his support (technical info, example code, testing).

While experimenting with the <video> tag on an HTML page with a web API endpoint as the source (ASP.NET Core 2.1.1), I noticed that the (not auto-playing) videos

• appeared immediately in Chrome and Firefox,
• but took a few seconds in Internet Explorer and Edge to show up on the page.

This is what the code in my controller looked like:

[HttpGet("{id}")] // api/video/example
public IActionResult GetVideoByName(string id)
{
	// ...

	var path = Path.Combine(@"D:\Example\Videos", id + ".mp4");
	return File(System.IO.File.OpenRead(path), "video/mp4");
}

Searching the web for the obvious keywords (IE11, ASP.NET Core, file, stream, slow, download, etc.) yielded lots of results for all kinds of problems. In the end I found out that I needed to enable something called “range processing” (pardon my ignorance, I’m more of a UI guy than a networking expert).

Fortunately, ASP.NET Core 2.1 offers a (new) overload for the File() function with a boolean parameter aptly named enabledRangeProcessing. So the solution is to set that parameter to true:

	return File(System.IO.File.OpenRead(path), "video/mp4", true);

Emaroo is a free utility for browsing most recently used (MRU) file lists of programs like Visual Studio, VS Code, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator and more. Quickly open files, jump to their folder in Windows Explorer, copy them (and their path) to the clipboard - or run your own tools on files and folders with custom actions!
 

• Download Emaroo on www.roland-weigelt.de/emaroo
• Get ready-to-use custom actions on GitHub, e.g.
  • Open a Visual Studio project/solution in a specific version of Visual Studio
  • Open the Visual Studio developer command line
  • Open a file or folder in Visual Studio Code
  • Open a folder in Git Bash or Git GUI
  • Attach a file to a new email in Outlook
• Learn how to write your own custom actions in a quick step-by-step guide.

About this Release

With Emaroo 4.1, you can now hide files or directories This is nice for hiding all those small tryout projects (“App1”, “App2”, etc.) that you are just not quite ready yet to delete on disk.

Open the context menu and check the “Hide in list” option:

To make a hidden list item visible again, check the “Show hidden” checkbox (to show all hidden items)…

…and open the context menu on the item you want to show again.

Then uncheck the “Hide in list” option:

The release also fixes a couple of bugs, so an update is definitely recommended!

Read the full release notes on the Emaroo website.

Emaroo is a free utility for browsing most recently used (MRU) file lists of programs like Visual Studio, VS Code, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator and more. Quickly open files, jump to their folder in Windows Explorer, copy them (and their path) to the clipboard - or run your own tools on files and folders with custom actions!
 

• Download Emaroo on www.roland-weigelt.de/emaroo
• Get ready-to-use custom actions on GitHub, e.g.
• Open a Visual Studio project/solution in a specific version of Visual Studio
• Open the Visual Studio developer command line
• Open a file or folder in Visual Studio Code
• Open a folder in Git Bash or Git GUI
• Attach a file to a new email in Outlook
• Learn how to write your own custom actions in a quick step-by-step guide.

About this Release

Version 4 of Emaroo is here, with major improvements for custom actions:

• New dialog for editing custom actions.
• New debug dialog for previewing how text macros are expanded before executing a custom action.
• New clipboard format for quickly sharing custom actions.
• New macros for more portable custom actions.
• Tooltips for your custom actions.

Read the full release notes on the Emaroo website.

The New Clipboard Format for Sharing Custom Actions

When you copy a custom action on the settings tab…

…Emaroo places a text on the clipboard that looks something like this:

§§!F5[*J,l;DzzK6yn}|N|U1op[BMW+uMsNa5QD-fRa#}~TEgEV^I7O#-1^kHDi;°(*VI|84#6XX*4%b
E{4A(+*Na;s,sUYLqQCjdDvmGd6aQ0oQ4Mek-|cHCVcXi:Z]BHkuh5|nt°3A]dkKiNMO-*{}apX+T=y^
10ETC°i5lL^Qcm~jSi,kSgax1Xhv*§§

You can then paste the custom action into a mail or chat window, post it on your website, Facebook etc. to share it with others.

The text format does not use characters that have to be escaped e.g. when inserting the text into HTML. You can also add or remove spaces or linebreaks as long as you keep the “§§” at the start and the end.

File-based Sharing of Custom Actions

Emaroo still does (and will continue to) support import from/export to JSON files (“*.action.json”) for version control and backup purposes – it’s always good to have the source .

Back in November I blogged about Shawn Wildermuth’s planned documentary about software development. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter campaign to fund the project didn’t get enough traction, so it was was cancelled.

Now, a few months later, Shawn has started another crowd-funding campaign, this time on Seed&Spark – and things are looking good: At the time of this writing, the funding has reached 85% of the goal.

So head over to https://www.seedandspark.com/fund/hello-world-film, read what the project is about, take a look at the big names in the documentary and maybe add your support to the project!

Emaroo is a free utility for browsing most recently used (MRU) lists of a variety of programs for developers and designers.

Download Emaroo on www.roland-weigelt.de/emaroo.

Tip: When you pin Emaroo to the taskbar and drag the icon to the left, you can quickly start it by pressing the Windows key and a number (e.g. Win+1 if the icon is in the leftmost position).

In addition to opening files or folders and a couple of other built-in features, Emaroo also allows used-defined custom actions. A custom action runs an executable of your choice, with arguments and/or a working directory specified using macros similar to those for the pre-build/post-build events in Visual Studio. You execute a custom action either via the context menu or via one of the hotkeys Ctrl+1, …, Ctrl+9, Ctrl+0.

A Custom Action for Git Bash

• Copy the following URL (direct link to one of the custom actions available on GitHub):

  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RWeigelt/EmarooCustomActions/master/git/GitBashHere.action.json

• Launch Emaroo
• Open the settings page:
  
• Click "Import"
• Paste the clipboard content into the "File name:" field and press the “Open” button
• Change to the Visual Studio page
• You'll find the custom action in the lower left corner…
  
  …and in the context menus of the list items:
  
• Repeat the steps for the other Visual Studio versions and/or Visual Studio Code

How It’s Done

Let’s take a look how the custom action is defined:

• Either open the context menu on the custom action in the lower left corner of the Visual Studio tab…
  
  …or, if you are on the settings tab, press the pen icon on the custom action:
  
• This will open the following dialog:
  
• For the Git Bash custom action,
• the “Executable” field contains the full path of git-bash.exe,
• we don’t need anything in the “Arguments” field
• and we’ll start git-bash.exe in the directory of the currently selected project in the Visual Studio MRU list (using the $(DirPath) macro).

See also

• Emaroo website
• Custom actions for Emaroo on Github

Emaroo is a free utility for browsing most recently used (MRU) file lists of programs like Visual Studio, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more. Quickly open files, jump to their folder in Windows Explorer, copy them (and their path) to the clipboard - or run your own tools on the MRU items! And all this with just a few keystrokes or mouse clicks.

• Download Emaroo on www.roland-weigelt.de/emaroo
• Get custom actions for Emaroo on GitHub

About this Release

This release fixes an issue where some variants of Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2016 and/or their MRU lists were not displayed.

See Also

• Emaroo website

• Release notes and version history

Am 3. Mai 2018 halte ich auf der dotnet Cologne 2018 wieder meinen Workshop “Von Null auf GUI - Design/UI/UX-Praxiswissen für Entwickler”.

Am 27. und 28. Juni bin ich in Nürnberg auf der Developer Week 2018. Am 27. Juni spreche ich zunächst in einer 60-Minuten-Session über “User Interface Patterns - Kochrezepte für die Gestaltung von GUIs”, am Tag darauf folgt dann der ganztägige Design/UI/UX-Workshop.

In meinen Workshops vermittle ich Entwicklern ohne UI/UX-Vorkenntnisse sowohl ein Grundverständnis für die Materie, als auch das notwendige Handwerkszeug für die tägliche Arbeit. Vortragsteile und praktische Übungen wechseln sich dabei ab, um das Erlernte in Einzel- und Gruppenarbeiten direkt vertiefen zu können.

Ich spreche u.a. über folgendes:

• Wissenswertes über die visuelle Wahrnehmung des Menschen: Warum ist man manchmal einfach "blind", wenn man einen Button in einer GUI sucht, aber nicht findet?
• Visuelles Design für Nicht-Designer: Ein paar Grundregeln, mit denen man jede Anwendung aufwerten kann.
• User Experience: Wie Gefühle das Handeln von Anwendern bestimmen und wie das Wissen darüber hilft, bessere Bedienoberflächen zu gestalten.
• Das passende Werkzeug zur richtigen Zeit: Mit Stift und Papier Zeit und Geld sparen - auch wenn man gar nicht zeichnen kann.
• Denken in UI-Patterns: Mit der richtigen Herangehensweise besser entscheiden können, was man sich von anderen UIs abgucken kann.

Wer als Entwickler gerne bessere GUIs gestalten würde, sich aber bisher die Frage nach einem Einstieg mit verwertbaren Erkenntnissen für den Alltag gestellt hat, für den ist dieser Workshop genau das Richtige.

Anmeldung

• dotnet Cologne 2018: Die Anmeldung für die Workshops startet am 7. März um 12:00, in dem Preis für den Workshop ist auch die Teilnahme am Konferenztag am 4. Mai enthalten.
• Developer Week 2018: Die Anmeldung ist ab sofort möglich.