Get selected items from explorer using C# .NET 3.5

Question

I am writing a .NET 3.5 WPF application in C#. This application needs to be able to get the selected items out of Windows explorer when it is in the foreground.

I already have the code working that handles a global Windows hotkey and then checks to see if the foreground IntPtr is from explorer. If so, I am able to obtain the System.Diagnostics.Process object that maps to explorer.

At this point, I would like to obtain the list of selected items from explorer. Perhaps there is a Windows API function that I could pinvoke to do this?

Thank you,

• G

Answer 1

The best I could find was to write a shell extension to handle this case. Unfortunately much of this functionality is now depreciated / not recommended for current versions of .NET and Windows.

I am taking a different route by finding items through the clipboard instead.

Answer 2

You could use clipboard for that.

When hotkey gets pressed, emulate ctrl+c and get paths of the selected files from clipboard. (you could also backup clipboard and restore it afterwards so it doesn't mess that up if one has something important there)