by Chad Yoshikawa
 
 
 Introduction

 News

 Download Code

 Documentation

 Discussion Forums

 Bugs

 
 
Introduction

The Galaxy Filesystem Toolkit is a Windows Shell Namespace Extension which enables programmers to easily create custom Windows filesystems using their language of choice.  Currently, bindings for C++, C#, and Java are supported.  Other language bindings are straightforward to create.

A simple C# mirror filesystem extension and a more sophisticated Java NFSv2 filesystem extension have been created and are available for download.  

 
    How to Start:
   (1) Download and install the latest version of the Toolkit
   (2) Read the Tutorials to create your own extension in either C# or Java
   (3) Use the discussion forums to post questions and get feedback.
 

Some examples of what you can use the toolkit for:

bullet Create a Solaris-like "/proc" filesystem on Windows using Java (or C#/C++/etc)
bullet Create an interface to Google GMAIL in C# using an open-source .NET Gmail API.
bullet Create a filesystem-like interface to a database using Java and JDBC
bullet Learn about COM/ATL shell namespace extensions by examining the source code and checking out the docs

What you cannot use the toolkit for:

bullet Map a drive letter directly to your filesystem.  However, you can use the Windows 'subst' command to map to one-level above your filesystem extension.
bullet Access your filesystem via command line tools.  The filesystem is only accessible through Windows Explorer, which should be good enough most of the time.   If you need command line access, you'll probably have to develop a filesystem filter driver using the Windows IFS Kit
 
Acknowledgments & License

I'd like to thank the following for their generous contributions to open source software that made the Galaxy Filesystem Toolkit possible:
    "An Almost Complete Namespace Extension Sample"  by Pascal Hurni.  This is a well-documented namespace extension starter.  I started with this code.  Pascal is allowing me to release his code under the GPL.
    AdfView  by Bjarke Viksoe.  This is a namespace extension for viewing Amiga disk files.  I used the drag-n-drop code from this extension.  This code has been released under the GPL.
    RemoteTea Harald Albrecht.  This is an open-source ONC/RPC implementation for Java with a rpcgen generator.  This was used for the Java NFS filesystem extension.  This code is released under the LGPL.

The Galaxy Filesystem Toolkit is licensed under the GPL.  A copy of the license is available in the source code zip file.