Using C# and WinForms in VS2008, I want to create a file browser control that looks and acts like the left pane in Windows Explorer. To my astonishment, such a control does not ship with .NET by default.
Ideally, I would like its contents to be exactly the same as in Explorer. For example, on Windows 7, it should show the Favorites and Libraries pseudo-folders. Of course, I do not want to code specifically for each version of Windows if I can help it.
I have browsed around, and there are some examples of such controls, but they are all hand-rolled and therefore won't work 100% the same as the one in Explorer.
Is there any way I can simply reuse the Explorer control instead? Or, if not, to get access to a tree of the items that it would show?
Microsoft provides a walkthrough for creating a Windows Explorer style interface in C#.
There are also several examples on Code Project and other sites. Immediate examples are Explorer Tree, My Explorer, File Browser and Advanced File Explorer but there are others. Explorer Tree seems to look the best from the brief glance I took.
I used the search term windows explorer tree view C# in Google to find these links.
It's not as easy as it seems to implement a control like that. Explorer works with shell items, not filesystem items (ex: the control panel, the printers folder, and so on). If you need to implement it i suggest to have a look at the Windows shell functions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb776426(VS.85).aspx.
Take a look at Shell MegaPack control set. It provides Windows Explorer like folder/file browsing with most of the features and functionality like context menus, renaming, drag-drop, icons, overlay icons, thumbnails, etc
Related
I'm trying to create an (ideally) all-in-one cross platform tile based map/sprite/image editor for a game engine, since the current official one is Windows only and doesn't play nicely with WINE/Mono. Instead of building one from scratch, I figured it might be easier to create an extension for Visual Studio Code, but side panes don't seem to be interactive, and I'm having trouble getting it to open an electron window.
Is this possible, or should I just build it from scratch with electron?
That won't work. Visual Studio Code is a code editor, which supports extensions that can either add functionality to the IDE itself or provide HTML content to show in an own pane. This is not enough (and not made) for a full featured editor-in-editor scenario (interaction is limited).
I've built an extension which has a graphical view of a graph (see the last image) using D3.js, with limited interaction capabilities (you can select/drag a node and pan/zoom with the mouse).
Better is probably to go level down and start with Electron (on which vscode is based). This would allow you to write any desktop application that can be written in HTML/JS.
My app Folders Popup is using the command ComObjCreate("Shell.Application").Explore(strPath) to create a new Explorer window. I need a way to tell this new instance of Explorer to comply with the Navigation Pane setting decided by the user (to show or not show the pane) in previous Explorer windows.
Actually, this setting is not taken into account by default in the new instance created by the Shell command and users of my app who prefer to use Explorer without this navigation pane are annoyed to see it reappear when my app is opening a new Explorer. Is there any solution to this (except sending keys to the Explorer, what I prefer to avoid)?
Simpler is sometimes better ;)
The Run command isn't just for executables, it can also open non-executable files like images/documents (as long as their file type is associated) and especially folders:
myFolderPath = C:\Path\To\Folder
Run, %myFolderPath%
Generally, it makes sense to use built-in commands or functions if available, before incorporating ActiveX, COM objects or DLL calls; those should provide extra functionality, and not replace what AHK can do out of the box. That, of course, occasionally requires some digging into the docs, but it's worth it! AHK is one of the most well-documented automation scripting languages for Windows.
Hi I wondering if there is the equivalent to an App Explorer in Sublime Text 2.
When using eclipse, I use the App Explorer panel to search by file name.
I have a file naming convention that helps me find files by there functionality within the system.
So say I want to list all files relating to the registration process. I search for "regis" via the App Explorer and get a nice list of the relevant files. This filtered list is available all the time until I search again.
I can use Sublime Text's cmd+p but prefer the above as I can see the folder hierarchy etc.
In essence it is merely a file name filter on the folder list.
Are there any plugins that may give me something similar.
Any help much appreciated.
No, as far as I can tell nothing like this has been implemented in Sublime Text 2. I would suggest opening an issue at Sublime's UserEcho forum.
In the meantime:
Typing "regis" into Sublime's 'GoTo Anything' panel will bring up the files you're looking for, and show you their paths (I realize this doesn't help you with visualizing the hierarchy, but that's as close as it gets).
I use a package called SyncedSideBar - this will at least show you a visual representation of the folder hierarchy in the sidebar, for the open file, if it's added to the project.
The GoTo Folder package by freewizard may do something similar to what you're looking for, but I had trouble getting it to work. Maybe you'll have more success.
Good luck!
The Eclipse content assist for PHP (and I'm assuming for other types as well) isn't using the currently active working set - it's searching ALL files in the project. How do I change it to only use the active working set?
When doing a Ctrl+Shift+R search, it was also looking for all files in the project (not what I wanted), until I clicked the small black triangle in that window and selected the working set I wanted it to use. Now it successfully only shows the files that match my search string in the working set. However, this doesn't change anything in the autocomplete content assist feature (i.e. doing a Ctrl+Space to complete the name of a function or variable). Is there any way to accomplish this?
I'm using Eclipse Indigo release, so it's very recent.
I'm afraid it's not possible the way you put it. Eclipse Working Sets just give you a way to organize your projects.
However you may want to take a look at Mylyn, which is fully integrated with Eclipse platform. Here and here is a nice overview of what you can do with Mylyn. But briefly, what it allows you to do is to create a task and maintain a context associated with it. This way, only the relevant files will be displayed in Project Explorer and autocomplete would suggest you only task-focused options.
My wife complains that I have too many icons on the Windows XP-Pro desktop.
I like to be able to quickly drop a file onto the icon for application I want to have open it. And I like to follow a link to open often-used deeply nested folders rather than navigate there. Thus, I have over 100 icons on the desktop.
(We share the same user account because we switch back and forth so often and because we both need to access the same e-mail, so separate accounts isn't the answer.)
I'd like to write a program which would have similar functionality to the Windows desktop. Then I could open that window to do the drag and drop work, but, when minimized, would leave the desktop display sparsely populated for my wife. As an added bonus, I could implement better organization of the icons than the desktop allows.
This is similar to what an Explorer window does, with the key exception that the desktop allows you to do some arrangement of icons. (For instance, program icons on the left (with the most used ones near the top), folders at the top, data files on the right.)
How do I go about getting an icon to display in a Windows Form (or on an appropriate control on the form)? (For instance, if I drop in a link to Notepad or a link to a file folder.)
How do I take the same action that the desktop does if the icon is double clicked? (For instance, if a link to a folder is double clicked.)
How do I take the same action that the desktop does if the icon has something dragged onto it? (For instance, a text file is dragged onto the Notepad icon.)
I'm using Visual Studio and C#.NET for programming.
I know how to do basic drag and drop.
I do not know:
A. what controls to use on the form to display the icons
B. how to find the icon
C. what commands are built by the desktop under various situations (so I can emulate the functionality)
I apologize that this is a multi-part question, but it was hard to break apart without explaining the whole story again.
This is a big question, but I'll give you some quick thoughts to get things moving in the right direction. WinForms exposes the functionality needed to make this happen, it's just a matter of wiring everything up the way you want it.
The key piece that you will want to look into is Drag/Drop, which is very well supported by WinForms. If you implement your icons as ImageBoxes you can set the AllowDrop property on the program icons and then handle the DragDrop event and have it call an overload of System.Diagnostics.Process() to start the application with the dropped filename as an argument.
As far as finding icons, most programs have their icon included as a resource in their .EXE file or in a related .DLL.
Regarding question C, the underlying question is what behaviors of the desktop would you like to have in your program? Explorer.exe is a massive application that does far more than what you need or what you will need or want to implement. Once you decide what functionality you want, play around with the IntelliSense list of events for the form and imagebox controls. You'll find that a lot of behavior is given to you for free in the Windows common controls, and additional behavior is fairly easy to add by handling the appropriate events.
Why dont you just use a Virtual Desktop??
Try http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/
You will skip a lot of coding.
Right from their page:
"VirtuaWin is a virtual desktop manager for the Windows operating system (Win9x/ME/NT/Win2K/XP/Win2003/Vista). A virtual desktop manager lets you organize applications over several virtual desktops (also called 'workspaces'). Virtual desktops are very common in Unix/Linux, and once you get accustomed to using them, they become an essential part of a productive workflow."