Adding a “fake drive” to Windows Explorer

Question

An application I use, Mozy Backup, adds its own "drive" to Windows Explorer that I can browse and view all the files I've backed up. Windows knows it's not a physical drive - it's shows up under "Other" if my drive list is divided by type.

How is a "drive" like this registered with explorer? I'd like to do this with a current .NET application I'm developing, but I can't find any explanation about how it's done. Also, I can't seem to find any documentation about making my application "browsable", meaning that it presents a similar interface that a user can browse folders and files.

Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about:
Example of Mozy drive

Answer 1

It is not registered with explorer. It is an operating system registration. What you do is write a device driver for windows that gets installed on the local system and looks to windows like a disk drive device. Instead of interfacing with some hardware (a physical device) your driver interfaces with something virtual (however, windows does not need to know this, it looks like a regular disk drive to windows).

You can find out more about writing device drivers here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/foundation/default.mspx

and here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms809956.aspx

Answer 2

You are out - sorry. Not possible with a .NET application IIRC - this is driver level work, which means C++. What you basicalyl do is provide a proper driver for that, which the operating system then can connect to.

What you CAN do is expose stuff on a website supportin Web-DAV (which you can do in ASP.NET ergo .NET) and then the user can connect this via explorer (which supports connecting to a WebDAV data container).

Answer 3

You can do this using Namespace Extensions.

They are a pain and time-consuming to develop and get right, so you might want to take a look at EZNamespaceExtensions.Net which eases things a lot.