EZShellExtensions.Net Awesome Library for Easy Shell Extensions

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Wednesday, March 29, 2006 2:41 PM Filed under:

General

C#/Development

Product Review

EZShellExtensions.Net Awesome Library for Easy Shell Extensions

I came across Sky Software's EZShellExtensions.Net via The Daily Grind and decided to check it out. Wow. I have to say I just love this library. There are so many different kinds of shell extensions you can easily do with hardly any effort at all. Take a look at a few tests I threw together:

There is so much more that you can do this this library for shell extensions (see the link below for a full list of extensions you can do). Support for both VS 2003 and VS 2005, .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. Definitely worth checking out!

Check out EZShellExtensions.Net

And no, I am not only posting this to get my free developer license ;-)

Comments

Jason Haley 3/30/2006 6:06 AM
Jiho Han 3/30/2006 5:54 AM

Ryan,

I had so many ideas for shell extensions but I wanted to do them in .NET because I could not think of doing it in C++. I'd have to dig up my old library, etc. and it would take me so much longer.

But I decided not to pursue it in .NET after finding out that it can be trouble:

http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2005/11/18/494572.aspx

I might still do it to learn the ropes of writing one but it sounds like with this library, all the learning was done by the developer of the tool. :)
Rob 3/30/2006 6:15 AM

That might not be such a good thing to do:

http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2005/11/18/494572.aspx
Ryan Farley 3/30/2006 7:47 AM

Hi Jiho/Rob,

I actually have read that statement from Jesse Kaplan before (that was linked to on Junfeng Zhang's blog). Obviously Jesse knows his stuff when it comes to the CLR. But then why hasen't Microsoft had any official statement on the subject? Not even a KB article? This was a one-time comment that was given as a response to someone in a newsgroup by a single MS employee. I know of some shell extensions from MS writen in .NET. Even the .NET 1.1 SDK samples includes one to demonstrate how to build a shell extension in .NET.

No doubt that this kind of thing is better suited for unmanaged code, and Jesse is not saying it cannot be done, only that it can be dangerous. However, I just can't use as my *only* basis for my decision to use .NET for shell extensions on a one-time comment from a single person. Even when the company he works for has done extensions in .NET and released samples with the SDK. I've tested my extensions I've built with this library on machines with all different versions of the framework on them, using apps built on different .NET versions, etc. All my tests yield 100% success. So I'm going to go with it. :-)

But that statement, in context, refers to creating shell extensions to build thumbnail/preview for custom file types. In this specific scenario I suppose I can see how things might go wrong when applications that use the openfile dialog with conflicting versions of .NET could possibly cause issues (again, however, my tests seemed fine). While you can do that kind of extension with this library, I really have more interest in the explorer bars, toolbands, and deskbands. This is where the *real* love comes for this library IMO. In this scenario, explorer is the only host and I don't see how that would apply to Jesse's statement anyway.

-Ryan
11/22/2009 7:25 AM

tuoglorq - Google Search
André Caron 3/9/2010 10:29 PM

Here's your official statement from Microsoft.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758089(VS.85).aspx