While we don't have a table of properties and filetypes that are writable, there is a programmatic method to determine if a given property can be written to a given property handler. Here's how it works: First, properties can be designated innate ...

The first question people ask at this point is "What properties can I write to what filetypes?". They usually expect a concise answer at this point, too. The short answer is that "It depends on the filetype." Not all filetypes support writing properties...

I'm going to be talking about writable properties over the next few days. I know that some of you are itching to try this out yourselves, so here is an overly simplistic program that will write a single property to a file. I have omitted a lot of diagnostic...

The general rule is that you should minimize the length of time you have a property store open. It is best to acquire the data you need and then release the store. Read-only property stores lock files for reading using a filesystem oplock . An oplock...

This coding expedition has developed a tool that can dump out all the properties on a file. If you are curious about the property system, I highly recommend you build this tool and run it on various file types. Coding to the Windows SDK Part 1 ...

Using the tool I developed in this series, I know that my test photo has " Rating: 5 Stars ". But how is this value actually represented in the JPG itself? Let's answer that by adding some developer friendly output. Here's what I did: First, I need...

In Part 4 , I discovered that WideCharToMultiByte converts certain invisible non-spacing Unicode characters to ?. This makes the output look really silly in a command line application. I want to keep this as a command line application, so I need to strip...

Yup, I'm one of "those" people. I play World of Warcraft to pass the time if I don't have anything else scheduled to do. It's the only game I play right now, so it weighed heavily in my decision to upgrade to Vista . At the time, I was very happy to find...

The program itself is provided in parts 1 , 2 , and 3 . So I compiled my program and ran it from the command line. Here's a snippet of what I got back: Properties for 'scan0010.jpg' Folder name: propshow Type: JPEG Image Name: scan0010.jpg Size: 638...

In parts one and two , I started writing a program to print out the properties on an item. But I saved the best for last -- printing a value. Discussion follows the code. HRESULT _PrintPropertyValue(__in REFPROPERTYKEY key, __in REFPROPVARIANT propvar...

Last time we saw how to bind to a shell item and get its property store. Today, we loop through the store printing out known properties. HRESULT _PrintPropertyStore(IPropertyStore *pps) { DWORD cProps; HRESULT hr = pps-> GetCount (&cProps...

The goal of this first expedition is to print lists of properties from items. This will give insight into the origins and capabilities of these different properties. Feel free to follow along and try out different things. There's a lot to explore. ...

In the near future I'll be posting code examples that compile and run. In case you'd like to follow along, here's my personal setup. My code should compile on RC1 also, so go ahead and use RC1 if that's what you can get a hold of. Windows Vista...