Raymond talks about registering shell extensions

As you can tell, I'm catching up on reading some of my favorite blogs... Raymond Chen from Microsoft wrote a really nice article about registering shell extensions. Setup developers should take note of how Windows deals with what you put in those keys.

What is a shell extension (also known as Verbs)? This is what Windows uses to determine what to do (or what right-click options to provide) when clicking on a file with a specific extension. Read this link to find our more. I'll wait...

In the setup world, I believe when you run a program from a setup most vendors use the ShellExecute() API. If this is the case, when you launch a readme at the end of an installation by simply specifying "readme.txt" the default "open" verb (on a fresh Windows installation for a text file this will be Notepad) will be run. If the method of running an application in your authoring tool uses CreateProcess() , it will likely result in an error if you simply give it "readme.txt". For MSI based installations, many people may use the tutorial method described in the Platform SDK. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to see what that one uses! Any guesses based on the specifications for the tutorial mentioned in this document?

If you read the MSDN documentation for these functions - which are linked to above - you will understand this quote from the article: "Consequently, the shell mistakenly believes that the program name is "C:\Program", which it cannot find." This can be a security issue if a malicious program installs itself as "C:\program.exe". Please make sure you are registering extensions correctly - even if the installation design document you are given dictates otherwise.