CNameSpaceTreeCtrl v1.0

One of the many GUI classes I have developed and published on my web site is ShellCtrls2. This is a enhanced version of the MFC classes of CMFCShellTreeCtrl and CMFCShellListCtrl provided with Visual C++. What I was unaware of at the time of implementing these classes is that Windows provides a built-in equivalent to CMFCShellTreeCtrl through a COM interface called INameSpaceTreeControl2 / INameSpaceTreeControl. Because this COM interface is a bit tricky to integrate with the MFC framework, I have developed CNameSpaceTreeCtrl which makes this job a bit easier. This code hides all the details of having to implement COM callback interfaces, grapple with implementing COM reference counting and having to call INameSpaceTreeCtrl::TreeUnadvise at specific times. The code also uses virtual functions which are easier to deal with instead of COM event interfaces. It also handles the low level details of the INameSpaceTreeControlEvents, INameSpaceTreeControlCustomDraw, INameSpaceTreeControlDropHandler and IShellItemFilter interfaces. The control also supports a good subset of the functionality of the ShellCtrls2 tree control class including file and folder filtering, access to the low level tree control class, Custom colors for compressed and encrypted items, Item selection and expansion, shell context menus, Drag and Drop and Refresh functionality.

The classes provided are:

CNameSpaceTreeControlEvents which provides a COM interface class to encapsulate the IServiceProvider, INameSpaceTreeControlEvents, INameSpaceTreeControlCustomDraw and INameSpaceTreeControlDropHandler interfaces.
CNameSpaceTreeControlFilter which provides a COM interface class to encapsulate the IShellItemFilter interface suitable for use in the INameSpaceTreeCtrl::AppendRoot API call.
CNameSpaceTreeCtrl l This is the main class which provides a wrapper for the INameSpaceTreeControl / INameSpaceTreeControl2 interfaces.

The demo application included in the download exercises all the functionality of each of the classes. A screen capture of the sample app running is as follows: 

The enclosed zip file contains source code for the classes along with a VC 2022 solution file to build a demo application to demonstrate all the classes.

Copyright

• You are allowed to include the source code in any product (commercial, shareware, freeware or otherwise) when your product is released in binary form.
• You are allowed to modify the source code in any way you want except you cannot modify the copyright details at the top of each module.
• If you want to distribute source code with your application, then you are only allowed to distribute versions released by the author. This is to maintain a single distribution point for the source code.

Updates

v1.0 (28 March 2025)

• Initial public release.