Programatically execute Windows Explorer context menu items

Question

I'm about to tear my hair out for lack of a consistent, foolproof way to get at the context menu items that Explorer shows when I right click on an item. I don't want to show a menu, I just want to parse the items in the background and execute them programatically.

I've tried various combinations of IShellFolder, IContextMenu, and other COM interfaces and I cannot find anything that works consistently.

I realize this is a vague question, but if anyone has any experience at all in the arena of programatically executing Windows Explorer context menu items, any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The closest thing I could find is http://oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/excerpt/winxphacks_chap1/index1.html which describes the registry settings that correspond to the right click menu.

Answer 2

The master of the shell, Raymond Chen, did a whole series of posts about IContextMenu on his excellent blog.

There is also a little freeware app called Runmenu that will execute items from the shell context menu directly (The website seems to be down, I'm sure you can find the .exe somewhere on the net)

Answer 3

Found some interesting examples of invoking shell menu commands at Google Code Search

Answer 4

It took me like an hour to find RunMenu so I'll save time for everyone else trying to find it. Here's the link I found, version is 2.2:

http://www.programbits.co.uk/downloads/runmenu.zip

Hope it helps.