With the upcoming release of Windows 7, one of the newly touted features is the Jump Lists, with their automatic population of most recently used items. Supposedly, if you've been 'properly' recording these most recently used items with the Windows registry, they'll automatically appear.
So, where in the registry do they actually need to be registered? Is there even a standard place?
I've done some more research, and I still can't find anything on this. Seems like a nifty feature, if it was actually available...
Update: The code project posted below has some interesting points to it; looking at the code, it plans to write the entries to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MyCompany\MyProgram\MRU Registry entry
in the registry. However, this doesn't actually do the registration with windows. The paths just happen to be stored in the registry, and not in any particular place for the MRU list.
Update 2: It looks like there might be some good information about how to do it in windows 7 with the link provided in the post by akaDruid. In the talk, they discuss configuring the jump list via a COM interface. I'm going to take a look at the video now to see if it can apply to pre-windows 7 apps too. (Of course, if anyone knows any better, I'd love to hear it...)
Update 3: FOUND IT!!!
The video below lead me to a command - SHAddToRecentDocs. The jump list is automatically populated with documents that your app adds to that list. The video goes over some other stuff too, but AddToRecentDocuments is the key. Thus, your "Most Recently Used" list can be stored/populated any way you want, as long as you've called that function.
Update 4: Watching further into the video, it looks like as long as your app has registered itself as the correct handler of a file type, the shell will populate an automatic jump list for you by calling the SHAddToRecentDocs for you. Amazing...something elegant and relatively simple done my Microsoft! :)
Update 5:
Recently found an article detailing the process on the Windows 7 for Developers blog.
http://blogs.msdn.com/yochay/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-taskbar-part-1-the-basics.aspx