Adding a "fake drive" to Windows Explorer

Question

The application I use, Mozy Backup , adds my own “drive” to Windows Explorer so that I can browse and browse all the files I supported. Windows knows that this is not a physical disk - it appears in the "Other" section if the list of disks is divided by type.

How is a “disk” like this registered in explorer? . I would like to do this with the current .NET application that I am developing, but I cannot find any explanation on how this was done. In addition, I cannot find any documentation on how to make my application “viewable”, which means that it is a similar interface that the user can view folders and files.

Here is the screenshot I'm talking about:
Mozy Disk Example

Answer 1

It is not registered in Explorer. This is an operating system registration. What you do is write a device driver for windows that are installed on the local system and accesses windows, such as a device for a drive. Instead of interacting with some equipment (physical device), your driver interacts with something virtual (however, windows do not have to know this, it looks like a regular Windows disk).

You can learn more about writing device drivers here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/foundation/default.mspx

and here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms809956.aspx

Answer 2

Sorry - sorry. Impossible with the IIRC .NET application - this is work at the driver level, which means C ++. What you basicalyl do is provide the correct driver for this, which the operating system can connect to.

What you can do is expose the material on the support website in Web-DAV (which you can do in ASP.NET ergo.NET), and then the user can connect it through explorer (which supports connecting to the WebDAV data container).

Answer 3

You can do this using Namespace Extensions .

They suffer and require a lot of time to develop and get right, so you can take a look at EZNamespaceExtensions.Net , which simplifies things a lot.