Extending ExplorerBrowser from the Windows API Code Pack to display non filesytem files

Question

I'm writing a WPF program in C# that needs to render a set of files in a file browser to the end user. The ExplorerBrowser control found inside the Microsoft Windows API CodePack contains much of the functionality I need... e.g. thumbnails of different sizes, sorting, browsing, etc...

The catch is that the files are not coming from the disk, but are available over a custom network transfer protocol.

I was originally thinking that I could simply extend the ShellObjectContainer class and ShellObject classes to provide the features I require, by essentially building an Adapter. However I've run into difficulties because these classes use internal constructors.

Overall it's looking like this API is rather hostile to extension, is there anyway to extend these components to do what I need, or am I better rebuilding much of ExplorerBrowsers functionality by creating a custom WPF component, perhaps by extending ListBox?

Answer 1

Yes, this certainly wasn't made to be extensible. Hard to see how you could get anywhere at all unless you create your own shell namespace extension. So that it is viewable in a shell window. Doing so is quite brutal in managed code, the shell's COM interfaces derived from IUnknown are very hard to use. Which is what the wrapper classes in the API code pack is doing to get a browser window in a managed program.

Creating the shell namespace extension is the greater solution, your custom files would be visible in a regular Explorer window as well. But write that kind of code in C++, both because it is so much easier to get the COM code going and to avoid injecting the CLR in any program that uses a File + Open dialog box. Although that is now technically supported by .NET 4.0