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VB Shell Programming: Integrating Applications with the Windows Shell (Visual Basic) Review by anonymous
Good Introduction to Shell Programming in VB
First off, if all what you want to do is to add an icon to the systray, go find _any_ Win32 API book or even search on the web. This book does not cover simple tricks like this. But if you want to write your own namespace extensions or property sheet handlers, read on.
Many people think VB and windows shell programming don't mix very well. Honestly, I was one of them. But after reading this great introduction, I figured I was wrong. Well, mostly wrong.
There are two issues that make shell programming hard in VB:
(1) As in most "advanced VB programming tasks", the first realization must be you _can't_ do it in pure VB. You need to import Win32 APIs and then fake you are writing your program in C. But that's a very old and well-solved problem, and in fact this book assumes you know how to do it: it shows the import statements without explaining how to get them. But that's fine, for I think most advanced VB programmers have already picked up this old trick.
(2) The windows shell is built heavily on COM, so must be the shell extensions. But this book is not about writing COM servers in VB... Apparently the author did not expect the readers to know COM before, so he offered a short chapter on COM basics that I find too short to be sufficient for the purpose of this book. For example, later on he started using jargons like "in-process COM servers" and "apartment threaded" (these are COM jargons) without explaining what they are. I tried to look up these terms in the index to quote the page number. They are absent---yet another proof of insufficient coverage of COM. I admit that shell extensions are in-process COM servers and so in most cases the readers are not expected to do anything else anyway, but this kind of treatment much weakens a reader's understanding of what he/she is doing.
And there are other problems that plague this almost excellent book:
(1) There is no separate treatment of what should the programmer do when a new shell extension comes out. As an example, icon overlay is not covered in this book. I think this is really the major reason I have to take half a star off: this book is more like "how I wrote those shell extensions" rather than "how you can write your own ones". For example, it does show many examples of how to turn a given IDL into more VB friendly, but not how can the programmer obtain the IDL of an interface that's not covered in the book. (OLE View won't answer all such prayers. Go check the platform SDK or, _cough_, wait for the second edition of the book to have a new chapter on that extension. :P)
(2) There is no coverage of debugging shell extensions. It's not as easy as one may expect, especially as VB will automatically re-register your COM servers when you execute your code while Explorer loads some registry entries only once...
Overall, this is a more than decent introduction to shell programming using VB. If you want to do some typical shell programming like having your own property sheet or namespace extensions, then this book is really good for the job and is worth every single penny. I would rather say it's 4.5 star, but I have to round down for the minor problems I mentioned.