SharpShell

SharpShell makes it easy to create Windows Shell Extensions using the .NET Framework.

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• Installation
• User Guide
• Supported Shell Extensions
  • Shell Context Menus
  • Icon Handlers
  • Info Tip Handlers
  • Drop Handlers
  • Preview Handlers
  • Icon Overlay Handlers
  • Thumbnail Handlers
  • Property Sheet Extensions
  • Desk Band Extensions
• Developer Guide
  • Building & Testing
  • Enabling Logging
  • CI/CD
  • Creating a Release
• Compatibility
• Documentation
• Contributor Guide
• Testimonials
• Projects that use SharpShell
• Thanks
• License

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Installation

Install SharpShell by searching for 'SharpShell' in the NuGet package manager, or using the Package Manager Console:

PM > Install-Package SharpShell

The latest official packages are listed below:

| Component | Package | |-----------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | SharpShell | | | SharpShellTools | | | ServerRegistrationManager | |

User Guide

All documentation is being moved to docs.

Some of the most useful guides are:

• Deploying SharpShell Servers
• Troubleshooting

Supported Shell Extensions

The following extensions are supported by SharpShell.

Shell Context Menus

Shell Context Menus allow the context menus used in Windows Explorer to be customised.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Icon Handlers

Shell Icon Handlers are DLLs that are registered in the system to customise the appearance of icons.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Info Tip Handlers

Shell Info Tip Handlers are DLLs that are registered in the system to customise tooltips for items in the shell.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Drop Handlers

Shell Drop Handlers are DLLs that are registered in the system to extend the drag and drop functionality in the Shell.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Preview Handlers

Shell PreviewHandlers are dlls that can be registered in the system to allow you to create visually rich previews for items that are displayed directly in Windows Explorer.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Icon Overlay Handlers

Shell Icon Overlay Handlers can be really useful. They let you display an icon overlay over shell objects to provide extra information. Programs like Dropbox use these overlays to show whether files are synchronised or not.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Thumbnail Handlers

Shell Thumbnail Handlers (or as they're sometimes known, Shell Thumbnail Providers) are COM servers that you can write to customise the appearance of the thumbnail icons in the Windows Shell.

Step by Step Tutorial on the CodeProject.

Property Sheet Extensions

These are extensions that add extra pages to the property sheets shown for shell items such as files, network shares, folders and so on.

Documentation.

Desk Band Extensions

These are extensions which add custom functionality to the Windows Desktop or Task Bar.

Documentation

Developer Guide

The repository made up the following components:

| Component | Description | |-------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | docs/ | Project Documentation | | SharpShell/ | The core SharpShell assemblies. | | SharpShellInstallerSample/ | An example of an installer for a SharpShell extension. | | SharpShellNativeBridge/ | Interface to Win32 code needed for property sheets. | | Tests/ | Regression test scripts and data. |

Most developers will only need to work with the code in the SharpShell folder.

SharpShell is currently developed in Visual Studio 2017, and can be built using the Community Edition.

In order to maximize compatibility, we do not use the latest version of each SDK. The following components are needed:

• .NET Core runtime
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Installer Projects
• Chocolatey (choco)

Building & Testing

As long as the correct components have be installed for Visual Studio, you should be able to just open the main ./SharpShell/SharpShell.sln solution to build, test and run any of the code or samples.

To build using Powershell (which is what is done in the CI/CD process), first allow Powershell to execute scripts and then install Chololatey:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Now the following scripts to run the processes:

| Script | Notes | |----------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | config.ps1 | Ensure your machine can run builds by installing necessary components such as nunit. Should only need to be run once. | | build.ps1 | Build all solutions. Ensures that we build both 32/64 bit versions of native components. | | test.ps1 | Run all tests, including those in samples. | | coverage.ps1 | Create a coverage report for the main SharpShell project (samples are not included). Reports are written to ./artifacts/coverage |

These scripts will generate various artifacts which may be useful to review:

artifacts\
  \build
    \SharpShell