TimoSoft-Software.de

In March I complained about Microsoft providing no usable documentation for the new features of Windows Vista Common Controls. As I wasn't the only developer with such complaints, Microsoft promised to improve the docs.
Guess what happened. Right. Nothing.

While asking Microsoft how these new features are working is like trying to communicate with a wall, a nice guy named Etan Bukiet finally helped me a lot. In this thread on MSDN Forums he reports about a conversation he had with the common controls developers. The outcome is frustrating, but at least it brings light in the dark.
Most of these new features are private to Windows Explorer and can't be used by 3rd party apps. Windows Explorer uses some private interface to enable these features of Vista Common Controls. Of course Microsoft didn't consider it necessary to document these limitations. In Redmond even simple information like "this feature is for internal use only" seems to be to secret. Well, I just wasted ~9 months, no problem.

So what does this mean for ExplorerListView? It won't have these features:

• Groups in virtual mode
• Group footers
• Group subsets
• Group extended icons (LVGROUP::iExtendedImage)
• Extended tile view
• probably more

I have a legacy VB6 app that uses a WebBrowser control and the Shell Automation OBjects. I'm hoping to leverage some of the new Vista Windows Explorer features for displaying images, namely the Medium -> Extra Large icon views and hopefully using a slider mechanism as well to manually set the icon size.

Apparently this can be done with IFolderView2:SetViewModeAndIconSize. Am I out of luck because of Microsoft's lack of support for the Win32API with Vista? Or would this just not be possible in VB anyway?

--
Eric Legault - MVP - Outlook
MCDBA, MCTS (Messaging & Collaboration, SharePoint Infrastructure, WSS 3 Application Development, MOSS 2007 Application Development)
Blog: http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault
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http://www.collaborativeinnovations.ca

Hi Eric,

I'm neither familiar with the IFolderView/IFolderView2 interfaces nor with the shell automation objects. I've always been using IShellFolder, IEnumIDList and so on. This probably requires more work, but seems to be more flexible. However, according to the latest Windows SDK IFolderView2::SetViewModeAndIconSize() seems to be what you're looking for, so you're on the right way.

I've learned that all the shell COM interfaces can be used with VB6 without problems as long as the shell doesn't call anything in your app from different threads. So I suggest to simply try it out which I think you've already done.
Maybe you could post some code so I could have a look at it. Maybe I can find the problem.

Regards
Timo