Kind of a digression here, but I think this might be a useful technique, if I could just figure out how it can be made to work...
If you right-click a file in Windows Explorer, you'll usually see a "Summary" tab. That tab has a handful of fields by default, like "Author" and "Origin" and "Comments". Office applications, MSI packages, and a few other things usually populate them. Turns out you can set these properties on any file, right from Explorer, even if the nominal file format doesn't support these properties natively. (Explorer will store them in an Alternate Data Stream.) From what I've read, these are stored as a simple list of name=value pairs, and custom user-defined fields can be added. I was toying with the idea of adopting this capability for various purposes. For example: IT department downloads. If we download a driver or program or whatever, we create a corresponding text file describing what it does, where it came from, when it was downloaded, the nominal release date and version, etc. It would be a lot more convenient to just make that stuff part of the file, rather than have to maintain a separate file. Anyone else tried using these fields for stuff? Did it work out? My biggest problem right now is that I can't find a way to add new fields to the list. For example, I might want to add "Architecture" for i386 vs x86-64, or "Download Date". I've done a little Google work. I've discovered that the magic words to find source code or API documentation are IPropertySetStorage, DocumentSummaryInformation, and UserDefined. But I can't find anything like a working utility or shell extension. Anyone know of something which already exists? -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
