Review: Shell MegaPack - Windows Explorer GUI Replacement Controls

This week I’m happy to put up an ad and review for Shell MegaPack by SSWare.

 

I’ve used parts of Shell MegaPack by SSWare in a couple of small projects I did(Windows Forms), and was wonderfully surprised to find their controls fully featured, easy to use and customize and  powerful in terms of abilities.

Their Windows Explorer GUI replacement Controls are the best I’ve seen on the market and can definitely help in making the Windows File system a part of your applications.

 

 

Apart from some minor annoyances (like this one which I had to find the hard way) and problems with earlier builds of VS 2005 (like this one), these controls work almost flawlessly, and are a mature product(version 7.1 already) to be used in real world applications.

 

Overall mark: 9.0. Great Product.

 

As an aside, I’ve also gotten a chance to use their excellent EZShellExtensions.Net product line, which helps in hooking those special file system events, and these guys know what they are doing.

 

Published Tuesday, May 30, 2006 2:35 AM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Monday, May 29, 2006 8:20 PM by Dean Harding

# re: Review: Shell MegaPack - Windows Explorer GUI Replacement Controls

Looks great. But with the EZShellExtensions.Net product, I'd be very careful writing shell extensions in .NET, because there can be a lot of versioning problems there.

The ideal solution would be similar to ASP.NET where the .NET stuff is hosted in a totally separate process, and the "framework" that they provide is in unmanaged code.

The problem isn't that you might have .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 extensions at the same time (which the .NET folks have tried very had to get right anyway). The problem is that if you run a .NET 1.1 application which then pops up a file Open/Save dialog, that dialog uses loads the shell into it's process, which will try to load your extension. If your extension is .NET 2.0, then it's going to crash.