Shell Links

The Windows shell exposes a series of interfaces that can be employed to manipulate different aspects of the shell. These interfaces are defined in the ShlObj unit. Discussing in depth all the objects in that unit could take a book in its own right, so for now we'll focus on one of the most useful (and most used) interfaces: IShellLink.

IShellLink is an interface that permits the creating and manipulating of shell links in your applications. In case you're unsure, most of the icons on your desktop are probably shell links. Additionally, each item in the shell's local Send To menu or the Documents menu (off of the Start menu) are all shell links. The IShellLink interface is defined as follows:

const

type
  IShellLink = interface(IUnknown) ...

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