file information as seen in explorer

[cramd]

When looking at a directory through windows explorer, we are given the choice of viewing the directory as: thumbnails, tiles, icons, list, and details. Using the "details" view, I can then customize my view by adding field information for "date created", "date accessed", "author", "subject", and many more choices. My question is, if the information is provided in the "explorer" view, is there any way to access this information from within a .Net program. I have discovered using the "fileinfo" within .Net, ex: "dim fi as fileinfo" I can obtain "name", "lastwritetime", "length", "ext", and a few other choices, but I don't get all the choices that are provided in the "details" view from Windows Explorer. I know the information is there, I just can't figure out how to get it. I have used this statement at the top of my program "Imports System.IO", is there another imports statment that I need to access this data?
cramd

 

[chiph]

Explorer uses several shell extensions to get this info. The columns for Author and Subject are provided by a shell extension that knows how to read MS-Office files.

AFAIK, short of opening each file yourself via COM automation, there's no way for a .NET app to get all those columns.

Chip H.


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[cramd]

Chip,
Thanks for your info, although I really hoped for a better solution, sound like I'm trying to achieve the impossible. Opening and closing files to retrieve that information is ugly.
cramd