I am looking into adding a link to my app to the Explorer (windows) context menu. I've looked around for how to do this. I have done it and it works just fine by adding a key to
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell
Searching the web I found this:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/441/The-Complete-Idiot-s-Guide-to-Writing-Shell-Extens
But this seemed so simple (the *\shell method)
http://www.howtogeek.com/107965/how-to-add-any-application-shortcut-to-windows-explorers-context-menu/
HOWEVER no app(on my computer) does this (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell) and I wonder if this is not the best solution. I think most apps I have use an inproc dll to work with Explorer. I don't know if that's why they don't go with the *\shell method or there's some other reason why this is not the best way. I could convert my app to an inproc dll if I had to but that seems unnecessary to me if I can use the *\shell method.
OF COURSE the big reason is that I have to logged in as Administrator to do this (*\shell). I was thinking of adding a separate little file that the admins would run. Which seems like a better way in a corporate environment (or any where users are not logged in as admins).
Related
My custom Windows shell context menu handler works like a charm, for all Windows versions from XP to 7, but on Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, installing it breaks the Win+X menu (sometimes called "Power user menu", or "Quick Access menu", or "WinX menu"): when hitting Win+X, the menu is displayed as expected, but its items do not work anymore (nothing happens when I click on them), except for the last four items at the bottom which still work as expected ("Search", "Run", "Shut down/Sign out", "Desktop"):
I quickly found out on Google that it was a well known issue for a great number of shell extensions that were not "compatible" with Windows 8/10. But sadly, I only found application users talking about this issue and its "solutions", and no developer talking about this. And the two "solutions" proposed by these users were:
Unregistering this shell extension
Uninstalling the app that registered this shell extension (which leads to solution 1...)
See for example this, this, or this to read people talking about this issue.
Note: my shell extension is applied for the * file type, which means all files.
Several days later, I found the cause of this issue in the shell extension source code, so I thought it would help other developers to share it on StackOverflow, as a self-answered question (I didn't find this question). See answer above.
I first looked at the shell extension sample code provided by Microsoft (which doesn't cause this issue), compared it with my code, and progressively replaced parts of my code with Microsoft's code and testing it after each replacement.
I found out that what prevents power-user menu to work is what you return in method InvokeCommand() from IContextMenu interface: if your extension cannot handle the given verb, it shall always return E_FAIL so that Windows tries with other implementations of IContextMenu (see Microsoft documentation for more details). It seems that when a power-user menu item was clicked, Windows first called my extension (* file type), then since it didn't return E_FAIL for this unknown verb, Windows thought that my shell extension has processed this event, so it didn't process it through the nominal power-user menu callback.
By the way, three things seem very weird to me:
Why does Windows even try to process this power-user menu event with a shell file extension? Is this menu coded using the same design/mechanism as any other Explorer's file contextual menu?
Why does this bug didn't produce more side-effects yet? I mean this should have broken the whole shell extension system right from the beginning, no?
Why do so many applications has this bug? (meaning why so many applications do not return E_FAIL as expected?). It's been a while now that I've written this code, I can't really remember where it comes from, but I guess it comes from a Microsoft sample or any Microsoft employee tutorial (far too Microsoft-oriented to be coded by yourself). If it's the case, that may answer the question why so many shell extensions cause this issue...
I would be interested if someone has some ideas to share about this subject!
By the way, I hope my post can help other developers. When looking at the new Microsoft example that works like a charm, I was first afraid having to rewrite all my shell extension from their sample without knowing what was wrong in my code!
I'm creating an installer at work that must open a file browser. There is no file browser in wix, so I built a custom vbscript action that uses the Shell.BrowseForFolder method. It's working fine, but the file dialog shows up behind the main wix window. Does anyone know a wix/vbscript approach I could take to solve this problem?
Locate the HWND for the MSI UI and pass this into Shell.BrowseForFolder. I see a few example solutions that use FindWindow("MsiDialogCloseClass", vbNullString). Be careful about launching UI from a custom action: you need to consider silent installs/repair/uninstall, etc to make sure you get it right in all cases.
It looks like you're trying to allow the user to pick a directory. MSI has native support for this. I reccomend you use that. For an example see http://wix.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#src/ext/UIExtension/wixlib/BrowseDlg.wxs.
When automating excel using the Excel Interop API, I can easily do a range search using the method Range.Find. I am passing through the LookIn, LookAt, SearchOrder, SearchDirection, and MatchCase options for the Find. This as noted by the MSDN documentation, persists the values passed into this method into the user settings, so the next time that the user opens the find form, the options will be selected which I used in the Range.Find method.
I need to persist the values of the find options before and after I do the programmatic find. So I want to capture the current find options, then do the Range.Find, and then set the find options back to the options that were set before my search. However, I do not see that the find options are publicly accessible. Any ideas on how to get these?
I'm basically looking to retrieve current find option values for LookIn, LookAt, SearchOrder, SearchDirection, and MatchCase.
Update
The most interesting thing I could find so far is that you can access the Excel Application dialogs - Dialogs Interface. So here, I can get access to the FormulaFind dialog, which is slightly different than the Find and Replace dialog, though may lead to some of the properties I'm looking for. I haven't had any luck, but perhaps there's a way to access the properties through this form using reflection. I'll keep trying something with this.
// xlDialogFormulaFind, xlDialogFormulaReplace
Excel.Dialog dialog = this.Application.Dialogs.Item[Excel.XlBuiltInDialog.xlDialogFormulaFind];
Well, I am not sure if you'd consider this approach, but I'll give a shot here in case it might be helpful.
What I would do is, I'd create a registry key holding the values you wanted to persist. I could then call RegistryKey.GetValue(valuename) to retrieve values, provided that there's no exceptions thrown.
As long as that registry key stays there, unchanged, and you have enough privilege to access registry key, you should be able to always get the same values.
Wish we could really use application settings here, which would make it easier, but, well, as you might have known, vsto add-in doesn't like it, according to this article.
You cannot use application settings in an unmanaged application that
hosts the .NET Framework. Settings will not work in such environments
as Visual Studio add-ins, C++ for Microsoft Office, control hosting in
Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Outlook add-ins and projects.
Hope this helps.
Due to the recently added "feature" in IE8 where new windows are automatically associated with a single session, some of our code is behaving erratically.
This is because a separate app would launch a new IE window when it was activated, and once the user was finished, close the window. This worked fine in IE7 because the session information in the windows stayed separate. However in IE8, since the session is shared among IE windows, we find that the "pop up" app would corrupt the session on the first app.
I have read about the nomerge switch, so that is a workaround, but I was wondering if there was a way of working the solution into the "CreateObject" of vbscript; i.e:
Dim ieWin As Object
Set ieWin = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
Is there a way of sending parameters when calling the CreateObject function?
No, there's no way to use COM to create an IE instance that specifies this behavior (or any of the others, e.g. InPrivate, No Add-ons, etc). The only thing you can do is create an automation instance that defaults to MediumIL using the CLSID provided for that purpose. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/08/03/internet-explorer-automation-protected-mode-lcie-default-integrity-level-medium.aspx
If you have control over the web application you are loading with your IE window you can set it's session to "cookieless" (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479314.aspx) which will avoid the issues you're having with multiple instances.
The solution we ended up going with, although it's more a work around than anything else - was assigning a new url to the popped up window.
Previously, it worked as follows:
Call centre agents would be using our internal app for other duties
e.g. "http://internalsite/somepage.faces" on a day to day basis.
When they got a phone call, a third party app would fire up
"http://internalsite/customerdetails.faces". This caused the issues mentioned above.
The solution we went with:
We assigned "http://internalsite/customerdetails.faces" it's own url e.g."http://customerdetailminisite/customer.faces".
This way the call center agent could keep their main window open for other stuff and still be able to handle calls when they came in.
I get the infamous "Dialogs must be user-initiated" Security Exception when I try to print some stuff in Silverlight. As you can see, the dialog is as user-initiated as can be:
John Papa couldn't help me much out neither, because I don't have any breakpoint set. Mr MSDN thinks it could also be that I'm just taking too long, but this is a demo application just as simple as can be.
Any ideas? I guess it's a Visual Studio quirk, maybe some extensions interfering, as things seems to work when I launch the application outside of it. I first thought maybe the Code Contracts are interfering with their IL weaving, but they are deactivated for this project.
Update: This is just a simple Silverlight application that runs locally from the file system. When I do "Start debugging", Visual Studio creates a hosting HTML file containing the Silverlight app in the Debug resp. Release folder of the project, launches the Internet Explorer with that HTML file and attaches the debugger to it.
Update 2: I also get the same error when I create a web project to host the Silverlight app and create a virtual directory for it on IIS.
I might also want to add that I don't have problems with printing in other Silverlight projects regardless of their hosting scenarios.
Update 3: I downloaded FireFox and it works, I don't get the error when I debug with it. So it seems to have to do with my IE8. I uploaded the solution:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10401470/Code/Demos/PrintingDemo.zip
I wonder if anyone can reproduce?
Anyone got an idea to which team I should file a bug report? Silverlight team? IE team? VS Debugger team?
I'm able to reproduce this. You have handled the Click twice, once in XAML another time in code. See your MainPage.xaml
<Button x:Name="PrintButton"
Content="Gotta print 'em!" Margin="8"
Click="PrintButton_Click" />
Don't feel bad about it. I did it last time through a misplaced Print inside a loop.
I've also experienced this strange behaviour. A standard button click event immediately invoking an OpenFileDialog. It would frequently generate the same error when being debugged but would eventually be coaxed in to working when the button is clicked several times.
However when built as a release (or perhaps simply by running the same Xap without a debugger attached to the browser) the problem would go away.
Try to remove
if(SightPaleceListBox.Items.Count > 0)
I had the same problem and found out that the reason was this following line:
cnvsMain.Children.Remove(PrintPagePlaceHolder);
cnvMain is on the page that the user pushed the Print button on (I was trying to remove it from that page in order to add it to the canvas that I was going to print).
My tip: try to comment rows one by one, until you find what row causes the problem. Than try to work around it.