Sunday, March 2, 2008

Shell Blog -- interesting blog ruined

So I've been poking at lots of interesting bits of Microsoft APIs, and was casting about for a new world to conquer. In the Shell blog I saw the 'Shell Namespace Extension: Created and Using the System Folder View Object'.

It's very interesting, it might solve some of my integration questions, and it's another couple hours out of my life that I would like back. What the entire (deleted) article didn't seem fit to mention is that when they say Microsoft Windows provides a default implementation of IShellView that what they really mean is most existing copies of Microsoft Windows do not provided any of these facilities

Because their code is (deleted) Vista only. Now, I don't object to Vista only code. But the Windows Explorer has only been around since what? Windows 95? Any code that talks about Shell Integration had better have a pretty good reason for not supporting their existing code base. And any code that does talk about integrating should mention any huge honking holes in the usability.

Microsoft: I want those hours back!

(Link to the Shell Revealed blog post: http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/2007/09/05/Shell-Namespace-Extension_3A00_-Adding-Custom-Command-Module-Items.aspx)