The truth is probably closer to this:

A third-party tool should not be required to create a simple screen shot of a window in 2011.

..and this?

Giving the user some control over the auto update process is good, but one button click should be enough and don’t force me to agree to the same license every time! (I assume the license is the same, we all know nobody reads those anyway)

Folder icon customization has been around for years but desktop.ini got a new feature in Win7; you can add custom verbs to the context menu. This will enable us to take over the default action and do whatever we want when the folder is double clicked!

We begin with a pretty standard looking desktop.ini:

[.ShellClassInfo]
ConfirmFileOp=0
DirectoryClass=WndSks.ExecAppFolder
IconIndex=0
IconFile=app\foobar2000.exe
InfoTip=foobar2000
ExecAppFolder:Cmd="%%\app\foobar2000.exe"

DirectoryClass is used to specify the ProgId with our special verb and ExecAppFolder:Cmd is a custom entry I made up and it contains the command we actually want to execute (%% will be replaced by the folder path)

Next up is the registry entry for our ProgId:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WndSks.ExecAppFolder]
"CanUseForDirectory"=hex:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WndSks.ExecAppFolder\shell]
@="RunAppFolder"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WndSks.ExecAppFolder\shell\RunAppFolder]
@="Run Application"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WndSks.ExecAppFolder\shell\RunAppFolder\command]
@=hex(2):77,00,73,00,63,00,72,00,69,00,70,00,74,00,20,00,22,00,25,00,53,00,79,\
  00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,52,00,65,00,\
  73,00,6f,00,75,00,72,00,63,00,65,00,73,00,5c,00,57,00,6e,00,64,00,53,00,6b,\
  00,73,00,2e,00,45,00,78,00,65,00,63,00,41,00,70,00,70,00,46,00,6f,00,6c,00,\
  64,00,65,00,72,00,2e,00,77,00,73,00,66,00,22,00,20,00,22,00,25,00,31,00,22,\
  00,00,00

The hex goo is just the string wscript "%SystemRoot%\Resources\WndSks.ExecAppFolder.wsf" "%1" and this little WSH script is the final piece of the puzzle:

<?xml version="1.0"?><package><job><script language="JScript"><![CDATA[
var WS=WScript,
WSh=WS.CreateObject("WScript.Shell"),
FSO=WS.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"),
a=WS.Arguments;

function IniGetValFromLines(lines,sec,name)
{
	// WSH does not have INI support?
	// We don't need true INI handling so we just fake it
	beg=lines.indexOf(name+"=");
	if (-1!=beg) {
		beg+=name.length+1;
		return lines.substr(beg).split("\r",2)[0].split("\n",2)[0];	
	}
	return null;
}

if (1==a.Length) {
	appfldr=a(0);
	inilines=FSO.OpenTextFile(FSO.BuildPath(appfldr,"desktop.ini"),1,-2).ReadAll();
	cmd=IniGetValFromLines(inilines,".ShellClassInfo","ExecAppFolder:Cmd");
	if (cmd) {
		cmd=cmd.replace("%%",appfldr);
		WSh.Run(cmd,5);
	}
}
]]></script></job></package>

I used to store this kind of shell stuff in %WINDIR%\system32\ShellExt but I don’t think that folder is used much these days so I just stuck it in Resources to get it out of the system root.

For the icon handling to work you need to make the folder read only (or system) and +s+h on desktop.ini to make it superhidden.

To install this as a single user you should replace HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT with HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes and store the .wsf somewhere in your profile.

It should be noted that D&D does not work. It might be possible to work around this by creating a DropHandler but then this would not be a “Notepad only” hack

It might even be possible to implement the menu and double click handling on older windows versions by using the CLSID and/or UICLSID hooks and some horrible hacks in the COM namespace handling but for now this is Win7+ only…

printf("%S\n",MyPathSkipXLPrefix(PathBuffer));

Until you add UNC paths into the the mix that is…

If the format was \\?\UNC\\server\share, MyPathSkipXLPrefix could handle it, but sadly it is not, the format is \\?\UNC\server\share so you need to copy the buffer and change the C to \ before you can display it.

They removed the statusbar with it it’s handy download progress indicator and replaced it with another bar that looks exactly like the bar it replaces, only with less features. Why not just hide the statusbar by default?

Not only did they remove useful features, they now ignore the visual styles and don’t care about the native look on XP:

…and don’t get me started on the tabs-on-top fad.

This is what MSDN has to say about this method:

Runs an application in a child command-shell, providing access to the StdIn/StdOut/StdErr streams.

Sounds good right?

The MSDN example code contains this line: Set oExec = WshShell.Exec("calc")

Wait, why are they executing a GUI application in what should be a example about running commands in a child shell? Could it be because Exec does not hook up the child process’s streams to the console created by cscript?

While it is handy to have access to the streams in the script so you can parse the output, sometimes you just want to execute something and print the output to the “real” stdout. Calling CreateProcess on a terminal application in native code is actually less work than doing it in a script! I’m not going to post the 6 lines it takes in win32, but here is my take on the WSH/VB version:

Sub PipeTextStream(ByRef si,ByRef so)
Do Until si.AtEndOfStream
	so.Write(si.Read(1))
Loop
End Sub

Function ConsoleExec(cmd)
Set sh = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
On Error Resume Next 
Set exec =  sh.Exec(cmd)
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
	ConsoleExec = Err.Number
	Exit Function
End If
On Error Goto 0
Do While exec.Status = 0
	WScript.Sleep 100
	PipeTextStream exec.StdOut,WScript.StdOut
	PipeTextStream exec.StdErr,WScript.StdErr
Loop
ConsoleExec = exec.ExitCode
End Function

call ConsoleExec("ping localhost")

This does not work for internal cmd.exe commands like DIR and DEL, for that you would have to execute %comspec% /c …

Windows does not seem to take the Integrity Level into account when checking for admin rights:

When requesting elevation, it does not seem to check if Current IL < High IL and just assumes that any token that has a non-deny administrators group SID is elevated and starts the process with the wrong IL when it really should show the consent UI and force the IL to be >= High IL on the new process. Once we are in this state (Non-deny admin. group SID and IL < 0×3000) there is no way for us to elevate a child process or to get a higher IL!

It would probably come as a surprise to most people that the simple reg.exe command fails when the console has the "Administrator: " prefix and most admin check methods (IsUserAnAdmin(), TokenElevationType=TokenElevationTypeFull and TokenElevation: TokenIsElevated!=0) indicate that you are elevated! IsUserAnAdmin is only documented to check group membership and is a pre Vista API, but the other two are elevated token/privileges specific so either my definition of elevated is wrong, or there are some major bugs with the IL handling.

Not showing the consent UI is understandable since UAC is not “hooked” into the system, but just starting the process non-elevated without a warning dialog is just wrong. When the runas verb is used with ShellExecute and UAC is not enabled it should just show the old Run As dialog used in Windows 2000/XP/2003.