Sometimes you just need quick, easy and light weight access to the Visual Studio Command Prompt (and here's a quick tip how)

Never In Doubt - Add the Visual Studio Command Prompt to VS2012

"Several times this week, I wanted to launch a Windows command prompt (not the VS Command Window which is different) while in Visual Studio 2012. More specifically, I wanted to open the command prompt in the directory of the item I had selected in Solution Explorer. I swear I could do that in VS2010 but I can’t find that in VS2012.

I gave up and did a two step dance:

1. Right-click selected folder | “Open Folder in File Explorer” [alternatively: “Open Containing Folder”]
2. Ctrl-Shift-right-click | “Open command window here”

That works for most purposes although I don’t benefit from the VS-specific environment variables.

Then I stumbled across an old blog post by V K Sumesh (2008) that describes how to add the Visual Studio Command Prompt (VSCP) to the tools menu. That’s worth a read for background. I’ve updated the steps here for VS 2012 and to suit my preferences.

Add VSCP to the Tools menu

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Simple, easy and very, very light weight means to access the VS Command Prompt.

As Ward states later in his post there's Extensions to add this capability, but I just liked this as it used capabilities built into VS since about VS Day One...