This is my second attempt at writing up my DOS tricks. I changed jobs, just like the original post said, but found the original tricks were woefully inadequate in real world use. Consider this as my first attempt at 'pro' tricks. I'll start with the basics from the command-line.
 
C:\Users\YzOrg>echo %date:~10,4% %date:~4,2%
2010 11

C:\Users\YzOrg>echo hi >  %date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%.txt

C:\Users\YzOrg>dir *.txt
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is B8EE-D08D

Directory of C:\Users\YzOrg

11/24/2010  09:32 AM                 5 201011.txt
10/01/2010  10:40 AM               210 SDK.txt
               2 File(s)            215 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  199,100,514,304 bytes free

C:\Users\YzOrg>set line=0123456789 ABCD 0123456789 ABCD0123456789 ABCD0123456789 ABCD0123456789

C:\Users\YzOrg>echo %line:~10,8%
ABCD 01

C:\Users\YzOrg>echo hi > demo%date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%.log & dir demo*.log
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is B8EE-D08D

Directory of C:\Users\YzOrg

11/24/2010  09:50 AM                 6 demo20101124.log
               1 File(s)              6 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  199,100,379,136 bytes free

C:\Users\YzOrg>set /?
Displays, sets, or removes cmd.exe environment variables.

SET [variable=[string]]
...<SNIP>

Pitfalls with using %DATE% and %TIME% in filenames

Time and date from OS can have spaces.  So put the log filename in its own variable and use

    SET MYVAR=%MYVAR: =0%

to replace any spaces from %DATE% and %TIME% to 0.

I recommend you follow this guidance, put StdErr redirection at the end of the line.

Here is the final snippet for use in scripts:

Code

set LOG_TIMESTAMP=%date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%-%time:~0,2%%time:~3,2%.JobName.log
set LOG_TIMESTAMP=%LOG_TIMESTAMP: =0%
echo starting at %date% %time% with log %CD%\log\%LOG_TIMESTAMP%

Output

starting at Tue 02/13/2011  8:26:57.99 with log C:\Users\YzOrg\log\20110213-0826.JobName.log

Other CMD Tricks

Use %~dp0 to get the full path of the current batch file.  %0 is the scriptname argument, '~dp' are modifiers to get the drive and path of that argument, %~dp0.

Rule: always turn off 'echo' in batch files using this first line:

@if not defined _echo echo off

Use 'set _echo=1' before calling the script to debug it (it will echo every command) References: set /?, call /?, for /?, setlocal /?

The post I wrote for GreenShot used a configuration file to tell the app to use the CLR and .NET FX that is already installed on Windows 8.  The same hack works for the Metro UI Tweaker tool from The Windows Club (which I found via winsupersite.com).

So grab the configuration file I used for GreenShot but this time name it "Metro UI Tweaker.exe.config".

How to run Greenshot on .NET 4.5 (Windows 8).  Greenshot is an OSS alternative for SnagIt (screenshot tool).
Don't install the Greenshot installer. It will refuse to install without .NET 2.0, even though it seems to run fine on .NET 4.5.

1) download the zip file and extract it to C:\Program Files\Greenshot. 
Note: On Win8 you'll need to be running a process with Admin privileges to create the directory and extract the files.
2) create Greenshot.exe.config to tell .NET to run Greenshot on .NET 4 with a couple of compatibility options.  https://gist.github.com/1223509

I'm thinking about how to take some of the middle-tier parallel concepts like #RxNet and apply them in a little OSS GUI app I've been thinking about.  I quickly found this gem, ReactiveUI PDF .  A couple of quotes that stoked my interest:

"What’s in this library

ReactiveCommand - an implementation of ICommand that is also a Subject whose OnNext is raised when Execute is executed. Its CanExecute can also be defined by an IObservable which means the UI will instantly update instead of implementations which rely on RequerySuggested."

 ...

"Some philosophy

A lot of examples of the Reactive Extensions make its domain appear really constrained, like the only thing it’s ever useful for is either handing web service requests and implementing drag-and-drop. However, here’s the key thing to realize - a property change notification is an event.Once you realize that Reactive Programming applies to any time an object changes state, Rx suddenly becomes  far more applicable to any programming domain - really, Rx is a library to model state machines that are context-free with respect to threading."

And, I can use all the high-level composition that I've been using in the middle tier.  Like Merge() to join streams of events, and Throttle() to do in one line that takes a half-page of code with other frameworks.  This looks promising.  One glitch.  The author of the library recently moved from Microsoft (Office team) to GitHub.  Uh-Oh.  But too promising to ignore it.  At least I hope he still works in C#, maybe he can help with the Windows OSS clients, like Git Extensions, which is written in C# (but not hosted on github).


nRoute is another MVVM framework that leans on Rx for event streams.  It's author is French.  Hmm.


It's good to have choices, unlike 18 months ago.

iPod

iOS Apps

StackOverflow + Google

For similar technology searches a few weeks ago I was getting spam/content farms of stackoverflow.com duplicated content for most of the results, with SO 3rd or 4th (obviously the content farms were gaming the SEO ranking).  Not scientific by any stretch, but getting better.

Microsoft's devs and testers write great little specialized utilities but far too often they never see the light of day. They write it for their team, and sometimes have time to post it internally, but all too often they're too busy to publish it outside the company.

This is one of those gems, and fortunately it is public.

My Scenario

I had a NY to FL file copy operation that was taking about 10 minutes with xcopy and pre-Win7 robocopy. The files weren't that big, but lots of small files, and one-at-a-time file copy performed horribly. Win7 introduced the /MT argument to allow 'multiple threads' to copy file simultaneously, which is exactly what I needed. But I'm not using Win7 (yet). Even better, the Win7 robocopy.exe won't run on older versions of Windows (both properly licensed). Nice. RichCopy to the rescue.

RichCopy is a graphical application for Windows and will run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. It also has (cryptic) command-line options for all of the various copy options like filter by name, filter by date, and copy file attribute. RichCopy really shines when copying huge files, but if you seriously raise the threading you can also get a boost when copying lots of small files (like source code files or in this case PowerShell scripts).

I've used robocopy a lot over the years, so while its options are cryptic I found RichCopy's options even worse. To save myself time I wanted to document the options I'm using.


Get it here. http://blogs.technet.com/ken/

Gotchas / Caveats

1. I was looking for a command-line tool, and this is a windows application. You can wait on the windows application (which does exit properly when given correct command-line options) using PowerShell's 'Start-Process -Wait RichCopy.exe' or in cmd.exe 'start /wait "" RichCopy.exe'.
2. I wasn't getting any command-line output when passing bad command-line arguments, and while it has logging options I didn't get them to work after a couple of tries.
3. RichCopy comes with a chm (compiled help) which explains all the options. But I get the feeling the author's first spoken language isn't English because the wording is clumsy. (Not that my blog writing is any good, ahem.)

Sample PowerShell

I was using RichCopy to copy my PowerShell profile to my DEV servers. It includes code to call robocopy (if found via Get-Command) and if not found fall back to RichCopy (XP / Server 2003 only). If planning to compare the tools a good addition would be to make this a script parameter instead. The code is available at PoshCode: PoshCode 2468