Moving smoothly through an application and having easy access to the app’s functionalities palette is a top requirement for a desktop application. It might not be the fastest way of handling your files and folders structure, but Windows Explorer provides one of the most elegant ways to do that. Speaking of this, the new design and feature grouping for the Windows Explorer in Windows Vista denotes the intention of orienting the usage of this application towards an increased efficiency.

Sky Software gave us even better news with their last version of Shell MegaPack.Net which easily recreates the entire Windows Explorer file/folder browsing UI functionality in your app. So we said why not take Shell MegaPack.Net out for a test and then post a brief impression on it.

The product is described as fully compatible with Visual Studio 2005. This seems ok and perfectly acceptable provided that at the release date, there wasn’t any beta version of Visual Studio 2008 released yet. The installation runs smoothly, and the components are automatically included in the Visual Studio Toolbox. When trying to include controls like a folder tree control or a file list control into your desktop application you won’t stumble upon great difficulties. That only depends on what you have in mind for your application, but the usage of the Shell MegaPack.Net controls is quite easy and efficient.

The large palette of Windows Explorer functionalities lets you practically recreate Windows Explorer in your project and rearrange its function in a way that best suits you.  There are some other extra features that can take the implementation beyond the capabilities of Windows Explorer. We looked into item filtering and customization of context menus, but we must emphasize some other available elements, like custom columns, custom items, item checkboxes, overlay icons and info tips, and these are not all.

Let’s say we wanted to have an application bar in Quick Launch style… Well, that really wasn’t a problem, because this package includes ShellObjects too and one of its capabilities gave us the answer. Other great features offered by ShellObjects are wizard UIs, SingleInstanceComponent, animated Tray icons and Vista – style task dialogs. However, one of the few things that we did not agree was the fact that the package installed itself only with Visual Studio 2003 compatible samples. This stands true for the demo version at least. Otherwise, the component does a great job in terms of implementing a capable desktop application UI.

The best way in making an informed opinion is to download it and put it to some real work. If the impression is a positive one, note that this week you can get a 30% discount for Shell MegaPack.Net. Only on www.blocks4.net!