Create shortcut to file on XBox Neighborhood

Question

I'm trying to create a shortcut to a specific folder on my XBox360 devkit. I can navigate to the folder, and alt-drag a shortcut into Windows, just like any other folder. But this shortcut doesn't work. Double-clicking it does nothing.

The only way I've found to get to the XBox folder is to open up XBox Neighborhood and navigate down to the folder - and I have to redo this every time I reboot the machine, because unlike local folders, it is not saved when Windows shuts down. It's a pretty long series of folders to go down through, and it's easy to get lost in the deep folder tree we have set up. Is there any way to set up a shortcut to an XBox folder from Windows?

Alternatively, a shortcut that I could put at the root of the XBox would be almost as good. Just don't want to have to always navigate all the way down through all those folders over and over again.

Answer 1

Unfortunately the Xbox 360 Neighborhood shell extension doesn't officially support creating shortcuts to folders on the console. When I try to use a shortcut to neighborhood, I always get a message saying Catastrophic failure. There's also no mention of shortcut creation in the documentation.

I've been fiddling around with the shell extension and rundll32.exe, and I've stumbled upon this unofficial solution:

"C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe" "C:\Windows\system32\xeshlext.dll",LaunchExplorer xbox://XDK\DEVKIT\Samples\Dolphin

Replace XDK with your devkit name and DEVKIT\Samples\Dolphin with the path to the folder you want to open (note that you must use backslashes here).

You can either create a new shortcut and use the above as the path, or you can create a .bat file and place the above in it. You can also run this from command prompt, of course.

If you create a shortcut and want the proper icon, you can find the Xbox 360 folder icon in C:\Windows\system32\xeshlext.dll:

I found this shortcut solution by looking at the registry and examining xeshlext.dll in a hex editor.