Visual C++ Windows Shell Programming: Putting Applications in Control of Their Environment

Recently I was tasked to develop a name space extension. Not knowing that much about the topic, I scoured the web for relevant information. Unfortunately this is an area that, in my opinion, is rather poorly documented. All I could find was a couple of articles written several years ago. Fortunately for me, I found Mr. Esposito's book, and found it very enlightening, and easy to read. It's the only book that I found that has a complete chapter dedicated to this rather niche topic. Obviously the book also spends a great deal of time covering the larger scope of shell programming. All in all, I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about shell programming, and personally, I consider it mandatory reading for anyone who is planning on developing a name space extension. Selfishly, I only wish the entire book was dedicated to name space extension, oh well, I'll have to wait for that book...

I have found this book to be very usefull as a guide to shell programming. The information in msdn is a good reference, but there are often many ways to accomplish the same thing. This book presents the various ways to approach a task and also warns you of pitfalls including misleading documentation and implemenation bugs. Also, the source does compile in vc6 if you select the appropriate build setting (non unicode). The problem is related to unicode versions of macros being used in standard c functions such as fopen. Selecting the non-unicode build setting fixes this.

When I picked up the book first time in my friend's site,I was amazed by what it describes.You know, I am a colledge student in BIT,and I major in computer science.I find out this book is very useful in my learning course.Thank you.

This is an excellent book on Windows 9x/NT Shell programming techniques which makes really good reading. The author takes us through each chapter, explaining minutia, undocumented features, pitfalls, pointing out bugs and workarounds all along the way. The book goes about explaining the innards of The Win32 Shell and Namespace Extensions and provides a lot of tips and tricks that can be accomplished using ATL/COM and the Windows Shell API. The author has done an excellent job of explaining the innards of the Windows Shell and how to put in Shell Hooks to get the most out of our Win32 applications. What is also good is the 'Further Reading' columns at the end of each chapter -- pointing the reader to related Knowledge Base Articles on MSDN, in addition to related articles on the subject from MSJ and MIND where possible.All the code has been written out using Visual C++ 6.0.

The "Sinister Italian" book has been an enormous time-saver for me. It's not a book you want to read to be sure, it's more of a book you want to scan once--so you know what kind of stuff is there--and then whenever you need something of the kind, you just go there and steal code. Shell-related stuff is very difficult to find on one place, the changes from MS come in droves, and most importantly, none of it is something you'd want to really study--it's hardly anyone's job description to know shell interfacing by heart. There's a lot on MSDN, but it's all over the place and mostly ungrammatical. This book solves all these problems--readable explanations, tons of sample code. I'm very happy I got it. Wrox rules.