What happens when the user clicks one of my custom Explorer menu items?

There are two ways to respond when the user clicks on one of your custom Explorer menu items:

• Execute Command Line - When clicked, a menu item can execute a specified command line. The command line can include the path(s) of the file(s) currently selected in Explorer.
• Execute Custom Code - When clicked, a menu item can invoke any custom code you write in C# or VB.NET.

For more information, consult the "Commands & Click" page in the "Using Mini-XMenus" section of the Mini-XMenus help file.

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How can my custom Explorer menu items communicate with my application?

Your Explorer menu items reside in a separate DLL that is accessed by Windows Explorer when it needs to display its context menu. Therefore, to share data and commands between your Explorer menu items and main application, you will need to communicate across process boundaries.

Of course, we recommend you use Mini-Comm to send data and commands from your Explorer menu items to your application. Order Mini-Comm and Mini-XMenus separately or as part of the Mini-Toolbox collection of .NET components.

You can also launch another instance of your application and pass it the appropriate command-line arguments.

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Does Mini-XMenus work with Windows Vista?

Yes. However, you may receive errors if you attempt to run MiniXMenusInstaller_NET20.exe as a dependency during an MSI installation of your application. This may fail in Vista because the MiniXMenusInstaller does not run under elevated privileges.

The way to fix this is to use the Orca tool to edit the CustomActions type. In particular, the msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate bit needs to be set on the install and uninstall actions. This is equivalent to adding 2048 in decimal to the existing type value. (Thanks to Christopher Taylor)

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