VB Shell Programming

Programming for the Shell

Suppose that every time you copied a bitmap file, its image was made available on the clipboard. Currently, Windows does not support this functionality. But with a data handler (see Chapter 8) you could easily add this feature yourself. Maybe you would like to navigate into an Access database as if it were just another directory in the filesystem. You could do it with the proper namespace extension (see Chapter 12). Or you might like to automatically process information on a web page (say, your online brokerage account) every time you navigated to the URL. A browser helper object is the answer (see Chapter 13).

These are just a few examples of the many things you can accomplish by programming the shell. But all of these examples, and all shell components in general, share one common attribute: they integrate fully with Explorer. This gives the impression that they are actually a part of the shell itself, and technically, they are. Why is this important? Chances are, the application that is used the most by Windows users world-wide is Explorer.exe. It is probably familiar to more people than any other application. This means that, by integrating your application with the shell, you automatically make at least a portion of your application’s functionality conveniently and easily available to anyone who is accustomed to working with the shell. An excellent example is the popular WinZip program developed by Niko Mak Computing, Inc: the two most common processes ...