BDD 2007 - Tips and Tricks - Sorting Applications

Hands up everyone who has tried to add an application to the task sequence and been frustrated by the fact that you can not control the order of the applications. Instead you have too scan through a list of applications that are ordered by the time you imported the application into the Deployment Workbench. Well this has frustrated me for a while and can become a real issue when you have a large number of applications to choose from.

It turns out that it frustrated a fellow consultant (Mark Piggot) down here in New Zealand, so he got one of our development consultants (Mark Rees) to create a little utility (see attached file) that sorts the applications alphabetically. It does this by simply sorting the contents of the applications.xml file.Then as if by magic you will have much less trouble finding your application when adding it to a task sequence.

To use this utility simply run the command:

BddSort.exe -filename <path to control folder>\applications.xml

This will then create a file called applications.xml.sorted which you can rename and use to replace the original applications.xml file.

This application will change the applications.xml header to include the following information:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

  *<applications xmlns:xsi="**https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance**" xmlns:xsd="*https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema**"\>

This should not be an issue but if it concerns you then you can simply update the header to look like this:

<applications>

   

                                Before                                                                                  After!!!

NOTE: Please remember to backup the orginal applications.xml file before making any changes.

NOTE: No warrantee of any kind, express or implied, is included with this utility; use at your own risk.

Disclaimer: The information on this site is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, confers no rights, and is not supported by the authors or Microsoft Corporation. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified in the Terms of Use .

bddsort-with source code.zip