Re-creating the shortcut to Visual Studio 2013’s Developer Command Prompt

Have you noticed that sometimes, the shortcut to Visual Studio's developer command prompt is missing?

I've noticed this myself in some of my development machines, and this seems to happen most often after applying updates to Visual Studio 2013. However, re-creating this useful shortcut is easy. Firstly, here's where the original shortcut points to:

%comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\
Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat""

Here, "%comspec%" is an environment variable that points to cmd.exe on your computer. By default, the developer command prompt is initialized by VsDevCmd.bat, which lives in the Common7\Tools folder under the default (always 32-bit) installation folder. Notice the double double-quotes (quad-quotes?) around the path, as required by the /k switch.

You could simply create a new shortcut for the developer command prompt on your desktop, for example. If you prefer to store the shortcut to your Start menu instead, you can place the shortcut file into the default Start menu folder at "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Visual Studio 2013". Another option would be "C:\Users\my.name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs".

Hope this helps!