Refresh Explorer folder windows on shell change notifications - #168
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josuave wants to merge 3 commits into
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Refresh Explorer folder windows on shell change notifications#168josuave wants to merge 3 commits into
josuave wants to merge 3 commits into
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Becoming the OS shell window (SetShellWindow, required for shell-mode operation) stops Explorer's own folder view windows from receiving shell-level change notifications, since that delivery path is restricted to whichever process the OS currently trusts as "the shell". Work around this by registering for the same notifications at interrupt level (not subject to that restriction) and manually refreshing any open Explorer window browsing an affected folder via the Shell.Application COM automation object. Fixes cairoshell/cairoshell#434
added 2 commits
August 19, 2026 20:16
These are documented in shlobj_core.h (Shell32.lib) and exported by name from Shell32.dll since Windows 10, contrary to the prior comment — no need for the ordinal EntryPoint workaround from pre-documentation era shell programming.
- SHChangeNotifyRegister returns a ULONG registration ID (not a handle); SHChangeNotifyDeregister takes a ULONG. Both were declared as IntPtr, which happened to work on x64 by register- passing coincidence but didn't match the documented contract. - SHCNE's underlying type was C# long (64-bit); the native fEvents parameter is LONG (32-bit). - SHChangeNotification_Lock's dwProcId parameter must be the notification message's lParam when registered with SHCNRF_NewDelivery (as this code does), not a hardcoded 0 — per the function's documented remarks. Also corrects a comment that called SHChangeNotification_Lock/Unlock "undocumented, ordinal-exported" — they're documented in shlobj_core.h and exported by name from Shell32.dll.
josuave
marked this pull request as draft
August 20, 2026 00:30
josuave
marked this pull request as ready for review
August 20, 2026 01:27
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Fixes #434 — Explorer folder windows stop auto-refreshing (create/rename/copy/delete require a manual F5) whenever Cairo is running as the shell.
Testing