Creating Virtual Drives in Windows (Visual Subst)

If you’ve ever wanted to take a long file path, and make it significantly shorter, you can!  A tool called Visual Subst is available which does exactly that.  This tool is a GUI version of the windows command subst, but is far easier to use.

For example, say you want to mount a long path like

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN

To a nice direct reference (like “T:”).  It’s easy, just download this tool, and you can setup all of your virtual drives, but windows will see them as any other drive.

Another great use of this tool is if you want a location mounted exactly the same everywhere, but on different machines, the implementation may be on the C drive or the D drive, or nested ridiculously far down and/or in different locations on different machines.  You can simply find the common location on each machine, and mount that location to the same virtual drive location on each machine, and suddenly you now have consistency amongst your whole environment.

Enjoy!