Just completed my fresh install of Windows 7 64-bit and one thing that has impressed me right away is that my media card reader now works! Since I moved from Vista 32-bit to Vista Ultimate 64-bit I was unable to get a working driver and had give up any hope of being able to use the card reader. It hadn't worked with the Beta copy of Windows 7 so I was really surprised when I got a message in the task bar telling me to fix an error with one of my drivers.  I'd searched the Internet high and low looking for a 64-bit driver and now all of a sudden Windows 7 had found one, so after a quick download and install I was able to take the SD card from my Canon and put it into the card reader and it works!!

You can see that I now can access the card just like any other drive in windows explorer.  It's a small thing but it now means I don't have to connect my Camera to a USB port in order to download my pictures. So far for me Windows is doing what it says in the adverts, "Your PC simplified". I've worked with Linux, OS X and all previous versions of Windows and this is the first time I've been this happy with a new operating system, here's hoping the honeymoon period keeps going.

In Windows 7 the navigation pane in explorer doesn't expand the folders as you navigate the hierarchy. I kind of liked the folders expanding as I go down through the hierarchy. If your like me and want to have the folders in the navigation panel auto expand click the 'Organize' menu and select 'Folder Options', on the General tab you will see a section 'Navigation Pane' simply tick the second tick box as shown in the side picture.

CLCL is a clipboard caching utility and one of the many tools I can't work without. This handy little tool allows you to add multiple items to the windows clipboard and then select which item you want to paste from the clipboard. The standard Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keys work as normal but you also have an addition Alt+C option, this will display a context menu that allows you to select the item you wish to paste from the clipboard. The tool is free and trust me you'll find the benefit of this when editing and working across multiple files. As you can see from the screenshot it also supports pasting images from the clipboard.

http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html 

This tool was also mentioned in the book "The Productive Programmer" which I have previously reviewed on my blog.

I've just written a Windows Shell extension for XP that gives some of the functionality that 'Copy as Path' provides on Vista/7/2008. If your like me and unlucky enough to still be using XP at work maybe you should check it out on codeplex. Please leave any feedback on codeplex and I'll try and incorporate it into future builds if at all possible.

Although not needed since Vista I'll try and maintain builds of this for newer versions of Windows as the Application code is very simple and the code could therefore be useful to anyone else learning to write shell extensions.

If you want to learn more about PowerShell Dr. Tobias Weltner has published Mastering PowerShell and is giving it away as a free download from PowerShell.com. This is well worth getting, just look at the table of contents and you'll agree.

1. The PowerShell Console
2. Interactive PowerShell
3. Variables
4. Arrays and Hashtables
5. The PowerShell Pipeline
6. Using Objects
7. Conditions
8. Loops
9. Functions
10. Scripts
11. Finding and Avoiding Errors
12. Command Discovery and Scriptblocks
13. Text and Regular Expressions
14. XML
15. The File System
16. The Registry
17. Processes, Services, Event Logs
18. Windows Management Instrumentation
19. User Management
20. Your Own Cmdlets and Extensions

I'm a convert to PowerShell for awhile now and use PowerShell script as often as I can to automate tasks that I just couldn't bear doing time and time again. Recently I've used it along with PSake to generate build scripts and to write other scripts that make setting up the developer environment a breeze. Trust me you'll never write a batch file again. This would also be a technology I'd recommend learning as it'll probably start showing up on hot skill lists soon.

Get the eBook here: http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/