How to implement a ListView control that is similar to Windows Explorer by using DirLV.exe

DirLV.exe is a sample that demonstrates how to implement an Explorer-like ListView control. The control handles some user-defined messages that make it display the contents of a specified directory. The ListView control displays the associated icon, the long file name, the size of the file, the file type, its creation date, and the file attributes.

The sample illustrates how to:

• Use the system image list in an MFC application to display the icon associated with every file.
• Implement the ListView control as a virtual ListView, that is, specify LVS_OWNERDATA as a style for the ListView control. This causes the system to send LVN_GETDISPINFO notifications to the control's parent for every item in the list that needs to be displayed. This approach greatly improves performance for large directories.
• Implement mouse and keyboard navigation: double-clicking a directory, or pressing ENTER when the focus item is a directory, changes the displayed directory.
• Use a fast sorting algorithm provided in the Standard Template Library (STL), to order the files alphabetically.

The sample does not use ITEMIDLISTs to identify shell elements (that is, files) nor does it use any of the associated shell interfaces. As a consequence, it does not recognize link files as such, it does not handle virtual directories, and it fails to identify an icon for console applications that don't have an icon associated with them.

The following files are available for download from the Microsoft Download Center:


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See the VListVw sample in the Online documentation.

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