Heed! Windows shell extensions
Posted on Fri 19 August 2016
I could see its benefit and I decided to approach this by tampering with the windows registry to create my context menu. Everything started off smoothly and I was wondering why people even bother writing COM just to right this simple extension to the operating system. about 16-20 items into my registry hack I found out.
There is an undocumented restriction to how many items you can have in
place on the context menu. At least I think it is undocumented. Having
searched through MSDN, stackoverflow and other google-bits I could not
find any substantial reference that would discuss this. On MSDN there
are bits discussing other limits such as 16
files https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsdesktop/en-US/f65cba01-b11b-4a87-a724-2be0bb101427/how-to-get-past-16-file-limit-of-dragqueryfile-for-shell-extensions-in-windows-7?forum=windowsuidevelopment or
on Stack overflow I found one other
being <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25799022/can-i-bypass-the-20-item-limit-for-statc-cascading-context-menus-in-windows-reg>
in the world who knew at some point in 2014 what I know now. Alas, the
question is still unanswered.
Conclusion: if you need proper limit-less shell extension, you need COM!