Before I begin, a disclaimer – I am getting a free copy of the software library I am about to mention. I normally don’t fall for this stuff (companies giving free licenses to bloggers) but in this case I am making an exception for two reasons – it’s a fellow µISV and the product looks really interesting.

Have you ever tried developing a shell extension, in .NET or not? It really is complicated, mainly because of all the registry poking and a myriad of COM interfaces. Unfortunately, many companies decided that it wasn’t so tricky after all which only led to a number of badly implemented extensions that would bog down your machine, sometimes even crash the shell (which would subsequently be blamed on Microsoft’s “crappy OS”). Yet it would be really great to be able to customize some aspects of the shell, like taskbar bands, Internet Explorer toolbands, customized Windows Explorer right-click menu, custom file icons generated on the fly, custom picture for the tile view, custom icon overlay, custom column extension… and the list goes on and on.

All this is offered in a single package called EZShellExtensions.Net, already in version 2.0, from the company Sky Software. Looking at the price for what you’re getting (about $99 without support and $149 with 1 year support), it’s actually quite reasonable, assuming everything works as advertised. You get integration in all Visual Studio versions from 2002 onward with skeleton code generated for you for each kind of extension. It looks really easy and you can develop in any .NET language.

On a first look, I thought – why would I need this? But then while skimming through the list of features, I found several different shell extensions that would fit quite nicely into my future product. You might want to give it a look at least – you never know, it might give you ideas too.