Gene Walli who works as an Engineer at AT&T recently contacted me concerning the tip “Creating a new file association in Windows 7” which I had published in the Admin Knowledge Base on WindowsNetworking.com:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1357898641695
Gene said to me:
Mitch, I don’t want to change the default operation of a file type, I want to ADD a new operation. In previous Windows versions, you could have multiple operations for given extensions, eg: Open, Edit, View or whatever. You could set the default operation for an HTML file to open with Firefox, View with WordPad, and Edit with Emacs. Any way to do that in Win7?
I pointed him to a thread on this topic in the Microsoft Answers forum but he said he had tried that and it hadn’t worked. He also said he had searched the Windows 7 forums and found this post by Ramesh Srinivasan dated March 28 2010:
The file types tab has been removed in Windows Vista & Windows 7, and replaced by “Default Programs”. If you need to customize the file type associations to a greater level (such as addition or modification of an additional verb in a file class), you may have to use a third-party tool or edit the registry manually.
Gene later contacted me and said he had found a third-party solution that could meet his needs:
Mitch, Picked around in a few other threads, found:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1357898662883
And it works fine!
The above tip was previously published in an issue of WServerNews, a weekly newsletter from TechGenix that focuses on the administration, management and security of the Windows Server platform in particular and cloud solutions in general. Subscribe to WServerNews today by going to http://www.wservernews.com/subscribe.htm and join almost 100,000 other IT professionals around the world who read our newsletter!
Mitch Tulloch is an eleven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and a widely recognized expert on Windows Server and cloud computing technologies. Mitch is also Senior Editor of WServerNews. For more information about him see http://www.mtit.com.
