ShellCtrls2 v1.03

One of the many GUI classes I have developed and published on my web site is CFileTreeCtrl. This is a implementation from first principles of a tree control similar to the left hand side of Windows Explorer. Because it was implemented with custom code, it has diverged from the tree control shown in Windows Explorer in recent versions of Windows. In addition, some features in CFileTreeCtrl such as network enumeration no longer work in recent versions of Windows. In addition It would be nice to have a list control implementation similar to the right hand side of Windows Explorer. As of Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, two classes became available which implemented this functionality using MFC. They are called CMFCShellTreeCtrl and CMFCShellListCtrl. I've recently taken a look at these two classes, but I wanted to bring forward all the functionality of CFileTreeCtrl in an implementation which provides better integration with the shell. I also took inspiration and ideas from the following codeproject articles: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1073213/Extending-MFC-shell-controls-functionality and https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/2271/ShellFolderTree. The result of all this work is ShellCtrls2.

The classes provided are:

CPIDL which provides a RAII class wrapper for a LPITEMIDLIST aka PIDLs. PIDLs are identifiers which the Windows shell uses to identify all objects which make up the Shell namespace. This class is based on the PIDL class provided by Oz Solomon with WndTabs extension for Visual C++ 6.0 but reimplemented using modern C++ 11 idioms.
CShellItemInfo2 This class is what is stored in the item data for each item in the tree control or list control
CShellTreeCtrl2 This class is an improved version of the built-in MFC class CMFCShellTreeCtrl
CShellListCtrl2 This class is an improved version of the built-in MFC class CMFCShellListCtrl

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 2019 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

v1.03 (4 June 2023)

• Updated copyright details.
• Reworked CShellListCtrl2::OnGetItemText to use IShellItem2.
• Reworked CShellListCtrl2::OnCompareItems to use IShellItem2.
• Reworked the logic in CShellListCtrl2::OnCompareItems to behave more similar to how Windows Explorer behaves.

v1.02 (23 April 2022)

• Updated copyright details
• Updated the code to use C++ uniform initialization for all variable declarations.

v1.01 (17 December 2021)

• Updated copyright details
• Fixed more static code analysis warnings in the code.

v1.0 (25 July 2020)

• Initial public release.