How to add a virtual driver like CD Emulation in Windows Explorer

Question

I'm not familiar with kernel driver development, so I want to know if there are other easy ways to add a virtual driver like CD Emulation in Windows Explorer.

Answer 1

Question about your question, are you looking for a virtual driver that is similar to how explorer handles CD Emulation, OR Virtual CD Emulation Driver for windows explorer?

Answer 2

More detail would help a lot on this, but here are some good general suggestions:

If you're trying to mount some kind of virtual filesystem for manipulation within Explorer, a straightforward approach that Just Might Work is that you could expose your filesystem over WebDAV. There are WebDAV libraries for almost any development platform, and all of the major OSes come with the ability to map WebDAV folders for use from within their explorer UI.

Answer 3

One approach that might be worth considering is the Dokan project. From the web site:

By using Dokan library, you can create your own file systems very easily without writing device driver. Dokan Library is similar to FUSE (Linux user mode file system) but works on Windows.

The DLL is directly usable from C/C++. There is a .NET binding, and a Ruby binding, both from the "official" project. Samples include a SSHFS, which mounts a remote file system over SSH, a ramdisk, and a mirror among others.

I've seen a whitepaper that demonstrated a file system organized by the tags present in a collection of MP3 files based on the Dokan library. I've also seen an description and demo that mirrored a user's Flickr photo stream in a file system.

I haven't tried it myself, yet, but plan to play with it "soon".