Windows Vista Registry Shell Namespace Extensions

The Windows Registry Shell Namespace Extension was designed to allow Windows Explorer to view and interact with the Windows Registry data via Explorer windows.

It demonstrates existing Shell extensibility points like IShellFolder2 and SHCreateShellFolderView and also demonstrates new concepts in Vista including the property system, property schema extensibility, and content indexing via Protocol Handlers. This project is implemented using C++ and ATL.

Windows developers, and especially those with an interest in developing Shell namespace extensions are probably familiar with the original Shell namespace extension sample RegView. This project is an attempt to bring that sample into the Vista era of programming and demonstrates some of the key advances available in the Vista platform.

The solution consists of three subprojects:

· RegNamespace - Implements all of the Shell namespace objects including the data source (IShellFolder2), the view (via SHCreateShellFolderView with an implementation of IShellFolderViewCB), the property store factory, and various other pieces, which will be discussed in more detail in other sections of this wiki. · RegPH - Implements the protocal handler and filter for the registry data source. This allows Windows Search to index the content of the registry. · RegLib - A static library of utilities shared between the other two projects.

This project is dependent on the latest Windows SDK for Windows Vista.

Also, you will need to integrate the Vista SDK environment into Visual Studio. This can be accomplished by running the Integrate Windows SDK with Visual Studio 2005 command that is installed by the SDK. Don't forget to elevate to run the command.

Once you have the solution built, RegNamespace.dll will auto register. I decided not to have RegPH autoregister during the build process because it is somewhat labor intensive. This will have to be manually registered "regsvr32 regph.dll" from an eleveated command prompt.

Requirements:

· Visual Studio 2005