You’ll find ShellBrowser 4.13 to be a breath of fresh air if you’ve struggled with any shell programming in the past. It’s comprised of 17 reusable Delphi VCL components that you can drop onto a form and start using. There are no external dependencies – no DLLs or ActiveX controls – although an ActiveX version of ShellBrowser is available for developers who aren’t using Delphi or C++ Builder.

Some of the components are visible while others aren’t. The key non-visible component in the suite is TShellBrowser, from which the suite is named. This provides facilities for browsing the namespace, a logical hierarchy of ‘explorable’ entities (shell objects) that descends from Window’s desktop. TShellBrowser makes it easy to enumerate namespace entities such as folders, files and printers. You can also retrieve the custom context menus associated with different shell objects and invoke specific entries in the menu.

TJamShellTree displays the visible shell object hierarchy and can be configured to show only the file system if wished. You can also change the root node used to display the namespace hierarchy. It’s normally set to SF_DESKTOP, but setting it to SF_CONTROLS will give you instant access to all the goodies you would normally find in the Windows Control Panel. Items selected in TJamShellTree are displayed in TJamShellList, which provides the same Explorer style interface you’re used to, together with context menu support and thumbnails.

TjamShellCombo is another component, which works like the combo selector along the top of the Explorer window. To create a convincing shell navigator, you need to ensure that all these components remain synchronised with one another. This is achieved through another component, TJamShellLink, which all the other components ‘point to’ via their ShellLink property. It might sound complicated, but it’s easy to do. There’s comprehensive help as PDFs, and you also get several complete Delphi projects with full source code. Highly recommended.