Sometimes I don’t like opening visual studio just for building the latest source code from the repository. I don’t remember who wrote the original registry tweak for this, but the credit goes to the original author.

The original tweak allowed to compile Visual Studio 2005 solutions as I use Visual Studio 2008 I had to modify the original tweak to make it work with VS2008. Click Here to download the modified files.

Unzip the files and you will see two folders. VS2005 is the original one and VS2008 is the modified version. Each  folder contains two registry files. One to add the commands to windows explorer and another to remove them. If you have both VS2005 and VS2008 installed on your machine you can add both the versions to the registry or you can add either of them.

Once you have merged the files in your windows registry you can see two commands added to your explorer context menu when you right click on any solution or project file. One for Debug build and one for Release build.

When you click on either of the commands a command window will open and you can see you build status.

Credit goes to the original author.