VB Shell Programming

The Project: FileSpider

In this chapter, we are actually going to build a very useful band object. Believe it or not, you might end up using this band object all the time. It’s that cool. So what does it do?

Okay, imagine this scenario: you are surfing the Web and you come across a page that has several files you wish to download. Normally, you would have to download one file at a time. Once the file is downloaded, you click on the next file, wait, click on the next file, and so on. Of course, you would also have to wait on this page or bookmark it if you wanted to continue surfing while the files were downloading. Pretty lame, right? Well, FileSpider fixes all of that.

FileSpider “crawls” a web page and makes a list of all files that are available for downloading. You select the files you want to download, and FileSpider downloads them one at a time in the background, freeing you up to surf to your heart’s content. You can also build your list of files from several pages. There are no limits here. The file list is persistent, which means that you can download the files at a later time should you wish to do so. Everything is automatically saved in the registry. All of FileSpider’s commands can be accessed from a toolbar in the band window. We’ll also throw in a context menu just to say we did. This should give you an idea how context menus are handled outside of context menu handlers (see Chapter 4). Figure 13.5 shows FileSpider in action.

Figure 13-5. FileSpider band object

We are ...