Tutorial for Windows Shell Extensions

Question

I've been postponing this part of the project because I haven't found any particular helpful example/tutorial for these 2 aspects of Shell Extensions:

1. Return information for the Hint when you hover over a file.
2. Context pop-up menu with extension context, if it makes sense.

Cheers.

Answer 1

Ah, you lucky boy. You get to read Mike Dunn's excellent series of tutorials:
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Shell Extensions

Parts I and III should be of particular interest to you.

Answer 2

VB Shell Programming mostly concentrates on VB but the descriptions of the APIs are applicable to pretty much anything that speaks COM.

Answer 3

Look at this CodeProject article:

Namespace extensions - the undocumented Windows Shell

This article explains how you can easily create a namespace extension with lots of features without doing lots of work by using some undocumented shell functions. The most noticeable function is SHCreateShellFolderViewEx, which creates the view for you and creates all interfaces you need for displaying the contents of your folder. You can modify the behaviour of the folder by implementing a callback function. This is how Microsoft implements its own namespace extensions.