VB Shell Programming

Developing Your Own Shell Extensions

Have you ever looked at some of the standard features of the Windows family of operating systems and wished that you could take advantage of them in the software that you’re developing with Visual Basic? Once you’ve finished Visual Basic Shell Programming, you’ll be able to add those standard features successfully to your software as long as they’re implemented using shell extensions. Consider the following three examples:

Context-sensitive icons

Have you ever looked at the Recycle Bin icon and thought that you’d like your application icons to behave similarly? For instance, perhaps you’d like one icon to appear if an application data file was backed up successfully and another if it was modified but not backed up. Or perhaps you’d like an icon that reflects the template from which a document was created. For these purposes, you can develop an icon handler. The icon handler developed in this book reads a file and displays an icon based on its content. You can easily extend this to base the displayed icon not only on some aspect of the file’s content, but also on some characteristic of the file, such as its creation date and time, its size, or its file attributes.

Browsing namespaces

You’ve probably noticed that the Windows Explorer, unlike the File Manager of Windows 3.x, does not just display classic filesystem objects. Instead, you can browse such things as printers, Control Panel applets, and computers on the network. Perhaps you’d like to make ...