Recursively Unblock Assemblies with Streams

Ever since my recent blog post Unblocking Assembly Due to AspNetHostingPermission Security Exception I have been pretty careful about unblocking Assemblies after downloading them from the internet.

However, today I decided to download the MVCContrib.Extras.release.zip which has over 100 assemblies, pdbs, and xml files of which ALL are blocked by Windows 7!

Since there is no way to multi-select and unblock the files at once, I shuttered at the thought of right-clicking each file and unblocking them one by one. There has to be a better way… and to my fortune there is :)

The answer is yet another useful too from Sysinternals called Streams.

Streams is a command line tool that lets you unblock one or more files at a time and you can even recursively perform unblocks! Yippee

Immediately I started to look for a feature to right-click folder option to open a command prompt at that location (like I used to with the Open Command Window Here Microsoft Power Tool for Windows XP).

I didn’t see an Open Command Window Here context menu for Windows 7 when I initially right-clicked on a folder, so I decided to do some quick research to see what is the best way to do this in Windows 7.

I was pleased to find that the feature is native in Windows 7, but I had just missed it.

It turns out that if you Shift-Right-Click on a folder then an "Open Command Window Here” context menu will appear! Apparently, this was a feature of Windows Vista too, but as I mentioned in a previous post… I upgraded immediately from Windows XP to Windows 7.

So, (after downloading Streams and registering it in my System Path Variable) I quickly typed in the following command to save the day.

streams –s *.*

Using Streams

Usage: streams [-s] [-d] </strong></p>

-s
Recurse subdirectories.

-d
Delete streams.
Streams takes wildcards e.g. 'streams *.txt'.

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Anyway, I didn’t know about either the Streams command line too or the Shift-Right-Click “Open command window here” feature of Windows 7 and thought I would share them with you. Hopefully, they help someone ;) If not, it will help me remember them in the future.