Custom Windows 7 Preview Pane syntax highlighting

Question

After discovering on superuser that there is no current way to add syntax highlighting to the Windows 7 preview pane, I figured if someone else hasn't done it yet then I'll go ahead and do it myself.

Is there an API or SDK available for Windows 7 that exposes the preview pane in explorer to customization? If so, what is it and how do you think is the most elegant way to accomplish this? I would like it to read the syntax highlighting options from Visual Studio to get the users favorite colors and code theme settings.

Kawasaki

Love to know if you've followed through on this. I was just searching for this and coming up with nothing so far. – Bigley

I started it, but about midway through I lost everything on my little portable hard drive and never managed to find the time to recreate it. Eventually I'll get around to again and when I do I'm going to push it to bitbucket or github. – Kawasaki

Oh man that's lame. I've recently started using dropbox, and hard-linking my project folder into it so that it gets backed up online automatically every time I close my IDE. Works a treat. Best of luck man. – Bigley

Answer 1

You must check the Preview Handler, you can download an example from here. The Preview Handler is used to display a file preview inside the Windows Explorer preview pane or other preview handler hosts.

You can check these links :

• IPreviewHandler Interface
• View Data Your Way With Our Managed Preview Handler Framework
• Using Vista Preview Handlers in WPF application

Ebneter