Tony Bazeley wrote:
> Rather I see the problem as one of perception, particularly with
> the term "shell extension" which I don't think I had come across before.
>
> While I now know what is meant by this piece of jargon I still find it
> interesting as I viewed a process such as bash, dos etc as a shell and
> Windows Explorer as what would be viewed in Linux/Unix terms as simply
> another file manager. However a quick Google search reveals that the
> term "shell extension" has now been appropriated to mean Windows
> Explorer extension.
Just so you know (and maybe for the archives/FAQ)...
Microsoft refer to (essentially) all the User interface that the OS
presents as "the shell".
For example, one of the big changes between Windows 3.11 and Windows 95
was the new shell (Explorer, the taskbar, "Start" menu, etc). This shell
was then ported to Windows NT and was one of the major differences
between NT 4.0 & Windows 2000. Longhorn will be supposedly again be
making some pretty big changes to the shell (*including* the command
line environment).
I'm trying to think of the linux/unix equivalent, and I'm pretty sure it
would be Gnome/KDE. It's what the user sees & interacts with, but isn't
*really* dependent on the underlying OS (there are partial Cygwin ports
of KDE & Gnome for example).
Anyway, a major cornerstone of the Windows shell is the Explorer
paradigm. Thus an extension to Explorer becomes a "Shell Extension" in
developer terms. Not least, I'd imagine, because Explorer probably
didn't have a name when the term was coined.
James
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Received on Fri Nov 5 14:11:45 2004