Introduction

ShellBrowserControls is a collection of ActiveX controls that can extend some of my other controls (e. g. ExplorerListView and ExplorerTreeView) by shell-browsing functionality. It is optimized for Visual Basic 6.0, but should also work in any other environment that supports COM controls.

Basics

The controls can be attached to instances of ExplorerListView and ExplorerTreeView to enhance them with shell-browsing capabilities. All the complicated things like enumerating shell namespaces, providing and handling shell context menus, drag'n'drop, extracting thumbnails, reacting automatically to changes within the shell and many other things are done by ShellBrowserControls in a highly optimized (e. g. by using parallelization) way. While ShellBrowserControls will take over as much work as it can by default, the client application can decide very precisely which tasks are done by ShellBrowserControls and which are done by the application itself.
While I implemented more checks and error handling than I have done in any other control before, this is also the most complex control library that I ever wrote. Shell programming is a very challenging task and Microsoft does anything to keep it like this, e. g. by not documenting things, documenting things wrong and implementing things in a very Windows Explorer specific way. So applications that use this library should be tested really well, especially with different versions of Windows.

Requirements

ShellBrowserControls Unicode runs on the following operating systems:

Windows 2000 (SP4 or later)
Windows XP (SP3 or later)
Windows Server 2003 (SP2 or later)
Windows Vista (SP2 or later)
Windows Server 2008 (SP2 or later)
Windows 7 (SP1 or later)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP1 or later)
Systems supported by Wine (Wine is a Win32 subsystem for alternative operating systems) - limited support
ReactOS (a free Windows 2000 clone) - limited support

The files shlwapi.dll and shell32.dll must have version 5.0 or later.
Some features have additional requirements which are mentioned in the affected feature's documentation.
Limited support means, that I won't invest much work to support those systems. If a feature works on a system marked with "limited support" - fine; if it does not and it's easy to fix, I'll fix it, but if it's difficult to fix, I probably won't fix it. Also I will test the control much less on those systems.

Support

Although there's no entitlement to support, you've good chances to get help if you either post to the forums or send me a mail.
Bugs and feature requests should be entered into the bug tracking system.

ShellBrowserControls License

         ShellBrowserControls
         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
         License for use and distribution
         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

         ShellBrowserControls Copyright (C) 2010-2011 Timo Kunze

         This library comes for free. You can redistribute it, but
         not modify it. If you use this library in your program,
         it would be nice (but isn't necessary) to mention its
         author Timo Kunze together with a link to his website
         http://www.timosoft-software.de in your software's
         About dialog.

         This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
         but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
         MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to:

Henk Devos, because without his work and insider infos, I wouldn't have the knowledge about Windows Shell programming that I have.
Nikos Bozinis, for inspiration and his awesome help especially with the Vista drag'n'drop stuff.
Jim Kueneman, for much help on tricky shell stuff, for inspiration and motivation.
Jim Barry, for much help on tricky shell stuff, especially thumbnail support.
Geoff Chappell, for his website about undocumented Win32 API stuff.
Wine Headquarters, because Wine helped me a lot on understanding how Windows is working.
Microsoft, for ATL, WTL and Visual Studio - great libraries and a great IDE
Igor Tandetnik, for his great help on learning ATL and WTL
Dimitri van Heesch, for Doxygen
Christian Lütgens, for his great work as beta-tester and for his help when I needed a 2nd opinion on some decisions.
All donators
For great music: Amon Amarth, Sirenia, Tristania (with Vibeke), Nightwish (with Tarja), Delain, Lacuna Coil, Battlelore, Within Temptation, Leaves' Eyes, Dimmu Borgir, System of a Down, Volbeat, Guns N' Roses

No thanks go to:

The persons at Microsoft responsible for documentation - If a part of the non-managed API is documented, one can bet that the article is either an unsubstantial one-liner, an article full of failures or an article that doesn't cover the most important parts.
The persons at Microsoft that don't care whether important features of the common controls and the shell are useable by 3rd party software. First you scare skilled developers away, then the users follow due to the lack of good software. Think about it.

FAQ

1. Why is event xyz not fired?
Firing an event is relative time-consuming, even if the event isn't handled by the application at all. Therefore I implemented a DisabledEvents property which can be used to deactivate certain events.
By default many events are deactivated.