Nutshell: Hosting two Windows File Explorers inside a WinForm… with the potential of sprinkling some utility hotkeys on top – e.g. “copy from left to right”.

Full source on GitHub

Highlights:

• Always wanted to try this and just finally got around to it… and it actually works to a decent degree.
• This is of course well covered ground with various other file managers… i just wanted to see if you could do it this poor man’s way with PowerShell driving… so one could readily make it one’s own with further customizations
• I was a longtime fan of Directory Opus… I think it’s significant that this meager alternative is customized via standard PowerShell vs a 3rd party scripting environment that must be learned… i.e. if you happen to already know PowerShell, you can jump right in with all that file handling power available
• The obnoxious part is hunting down the COM interfaces necessary to pull stuff out of FileExplorer… it dips into silliness like how IE is somehow part of the equation.
• See comments for all the good posts i drew from to cobble it together… lots of handy Shell programming nuggets to be had
• thanks to a handy github project, Font-Awesome is now in the WinForms domain – too cool
• notes to self
  • interop.SHDocVw.dll is generated from doing a Visual Studio reference to C:\windows\system32\shdocvmw.dll
  • interop.Shell32.dll seemed like it was going to come in handy but didn’t wind up being necessary
  • these are the only real FileExplorer API calls necessary for the CopyFile piece
    • $objFolder = $objShell.NameSpace($explorerRight_SHDocVw.LocationUrl)
    • $objFolder.CopyHere($explorerLeft_SHDocVw.Document.SelectedItems())
  • there are a few wacky interfaces behind the shell objects but the neat thing is that runtime dynamic type binding makes using real types largely irrelevant… i feel that does lose some self documentation in the balance so i’ve tried to include the pertinent interfaces in the comments for future reference and expansion