Kier's Blog

Title pretty much says it all. I’ve written a Shell Extension!

I can’t remember what I was doing now, but for some reason I needed to copy the full path of some file into some program to do some… thing. I was finding it increasingly annoying that I had to copy the path from the Explorer window, then either hand-transcribe (complete with mistakes) or rename, select all, copy the file name.

“Why can’t I just right click and select Copy Filename or something?” I said to myself, “I wonder…”

So I searched CodeProject for some information on how to write my own damn Shell Extension (with Blackjack and Hookers) and stumbled across this fantastic article by Michael Dunn. In the space of an hour I had managed to learn enough to make half of my extension: I added a context menu item to Explorer!

Now over to MSDN to learn about the Clipboard and history was made. After around an hour and a half I’d gone from knowing nothing about writing Shell Extensions or using the Clipboard to having a working Shell Extension that used the Clipboard. I love the internet.

This is one of the smallest pieces of code I’ve ever written and, ironically, one of the few projects I consider myself to have finished. For more information, including how to download it, go to the CopyExt page.

Who the hell designs all this God-awful software these days? There is more poorly written, unstable, insultingly-hand-holdy but slightly glamorous software in existence today than there are water molecules in, on and around the Earth.

Everything feels the need to hold your hand through every single activity you might want to do and most don’t even offer a way of disabling these pointless features. I probably wouldn’t complain if I could see even a wafer-thin shred of usefulness, but I genuinely can’t. Typical example of this being that immensely annoying protection method of everyone’s favourite IM client: MSN Messenger. Whoever the hell decided that it should decide to block access to some files with certain extensions to “protect your security” should be shot in the leg and thrown to the rapists.

“Protect your security,” what a ridiculous statement. (continue reading…)