This control simulates the appearance of the Folder view in Windows Explorer. To keep the control simple and lightweight, only a subset of functionality has been simulated.

The primary functionallity of the control is to allow container applications to easily embed a folder view in a reasonably efficient and familar way. The container can listen for various events from the control, the most important one being the FolderSelectEventHandler event.

The control uses a "look ahead" technique to load the folder tree in an efficient way. The tree is only loaded to a depth two greater than the current node being loaded or opened, giving the illusion that the tree is fully loaded, but it is really loading incrementally down the tree that is being opened. The loading process does not run in a worker thread at the moment, as experiments seem to indicate that the UI thread is not significantly blocked even when loading large folder numbers.

No attempt has been made to use the Shell API to walk the Shell namespace. The icons are fixed in resource files and are not dynamically loaded based upon the current desktop theme. Not all special folders are recognised, such as Network Places and Control Panel. No localization has been performed.

The full source code for this control and the driver application are freely available for educational purposes. If the control is used in a commercial application then appropriate documenation should contain a credit to Greg Keogh trading as Orthogonal Programming. Suggestions and feedback about the control are welcome, please send them to

FolderExplorer_proj.zip - (37KB) ZIP of the complete Visual Studio .NET 2005 Project for FolderExplorer.