Mapping a drive letter to a folder, the easy way

When sharing data between computers it is often helpful to have a method for structuring your data. In our case, even sharing our development code between a laptop and a desktop computer can produce pains. Sometimes, hard coded paths are impossible to avoid.

We simply structure our development code under a single folder and then we map that folder to a drive letter. There is a Windows utility called subst to accomplish this but it doesn’t maintain settings if the computer is turned off. We recently ran across a utility from NTWind that provides a visual GUI for this utility and furthermore, allows the settings to be persistent.

A note to keep in mind: If you need to run another application that needs elevated permissions and also need access to this drive, you will need to elevate the permissions for the Visual Subst utility as well. Just right click on the shortcut, click on the compatibility tab and check the checkbox next to run as administrator.

http://www.ntwind.com/software/utilities/visual-subst.html