SoC idea: enhance the Program Manager, winefile and friends - Converting VB program to ANSI C for Windows Explorer replacement.

[Steven Edwards]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 12:11 AM, James McKenzie
<jjmckenzie51 at sprintpcs.com> wrote:
>  It has been asked if any of these are written in ANSI C, how about
>  converting the last one into ANSI C?  That would definitely be a mind
>  expanding project, IMHO.  I've done language conversion in the past, and
>  would do so now, if I had the available resource, time.   Would that be
>  a good GSOC project?

The real problem is most of the work needs to be done in shell32 not
explorer. If you look at Thomas Widenmullers explorer-new verses the
old ReactOS explorer (which is still default) you'll see that most of
windows explorer actually lives there and not enough of the shell
namespace and friends is actually implemented. Thats partly another
reason I suggested using Program Manager and Winefile. For examples
see below. I know linking to ReactOS code is normally not  acceptable
policy here but both the author of explorer Martin Fuchs and
explorer-new Thomas Widenmuller, have contributed quite a bit to Wine
in the past and besides, its obvious there is no way in hell they are
derived from Windows.

http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/shell/explorer/
http://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/trunk/reactos/base/shell/explorer-new/

Explorer-new is written in C but it neither works on ReactOS or Wine
at this time. I don't think basing our explorer off of a third party
shell replacement that duplicated functionality that needs to be
reimplemented in shell32 is a good idea.

-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo