Developer Skill Sprint: Windows Shell Integration
Learn about Windows Shell Integration, including basic file system integration, taskbar buttons and jump lists, drag and drop from explorer and shell extensions.
Learning resources
- VCL in XE7: TaskBar Buttons and JumpList
- Creating Shell Extension Handlers (MSDN)
- Shell Extensions with Delphi
- Sample download (Zip)
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The drag/drop example is trivial and just scratches the surface of what you REALLY need to do to properly support drag-and-drop, which is to use OLE drag-and-drop. It's a major job to do this, and it would be really great if Embarcadero supplied easy-to-use but highly flexible wrappers around all the base Windows interfaces that make it happen. These include: IDataObject, IDropTarget, IDropSource, IDragSourceHelper2, IDropTargetHelper. For example, to flexibly support drag/drop of images to/from a wide variety of existing software is SURPRISINGLY difficult, as there's multiple ways of providing an image in IDataObject and you have to support them all. A good wrapper would make it easy to address those cases, while still allowing for custom user entries in the IDataObject.