I've had a few mini-posts about various handy things lying around, and I thought I'd lump them up into a single post. Here goes...

EDN Batch Files
If you are like me, and have loaded your entire EDN subscription onto your development box, you may have a whole mess of services gobbling up resources when you really don't need them. I got a little sick of this so I created some batch files to start and stop services as I need them. These are super simple to create, but I thought I'd throw the code up here so you can simply copy/paste.

arcstart.bat

net start MSSQLSERVER
net start esri_sde
net start "ESRI Image Server"
net start "ESRIImageServerReporter"
net start "ESRI Image ServiceProvider: 3983"
net start ArcServerObjectManager

arcstop.bat

net stop ArcServerObjectManager
net stop esri_sde
net stop MSSQLSERVER
net stop "ESRIImageServerReporter"
net stop "ESRI Image ServiceProvider: 3983"
net stop "ESRI Image Server"

[Notes: If you're running Image Server on a different port, you'll need to change the 3983 to your port number. Also - if you're using SQL Express, the service name is MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS]

I also created some subsets of these scripts to start just MSSQL/ArcSDE if I'm working with ArcMap only, just Image Server if that's what I'm up to, and just ArcGIS Server if that's what I need. It's nice to have these packages on my workstation, but when they are all up and running they can easily eat a more than a gig of RAM - so it's nice to be able to start and stop them as needed. To make this even easier to user, I map these scripts into SlickRun...

SlickRun
For anyone who spends their day working with a PC, SlickRun is awesome. Get it now. Really. Now. I'm not kidding. It takes a little getting used to (like 5 minutes), and then you are hooked. Basically it's a n application launcher, but a pretty smart one. When not in use, you can set it to be hidden so it does not clutter up your desktop. When you need to do something, just hit the hot-key (configurable) and it will jump to your mouse and you can type in what you want. A simple example would be mapping "vs" to open visual studio - this is the most basic usage. You can get more complex though.

For example - if I want to search EDN for IWorkspace, I hit my hot-key <win+Q> type "edn IWorkspace" and hit enter. It then opens my browser and executes the search. Nice.

Here are some of my Magic words...

Magic Word	Description	Target
'	Google Search	http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=$W$
edn	EDN Search	http://edn.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=search.results&c_2_a=on&dl_1=on&sa=2&q=$W$
map	ArcMap	C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Bin\ArcMap.exe
cat	ArcCatalog	C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Bin\ArcCatalog.exe
em:<name>	Email someone	C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE /c ipm.message /m "<email address>"
msdn	Search MSDN	http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amsdn.microsoft.com+$W$
2003	VS2003	C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe
2005	VS2005	C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe
blog	my blog	http://blog.davebouwman.net
arcstart	Start EDN Services	c:\batch\arcstart.bat
arcstop	Stop EDN Services	c:\batch\arcstop.bat

You'd be suprised just how much time slick run saves over a given day.