Recently, an acquaintance noticed that FindExecutable doesn't always work, in
particular with certain 5-letter file extensions. He needed a way to find the
associated executable for these, and another acquaintance suggested using the
AssocQueryString API. It wasn't one I was very familiar with, but I quickly
became so when I took a look at the sorts of information it can provide. Here's
an example of what this sample gives you for any given extension / verb
combination:
The core of this project is a drop-in ready class you can just instantiate
and pass the desired extension to. The CAssociations class uses "open" as the
default verb, but you can provide anything you'd like. It's actually a very nice
way to determine whether a verb, like "print", is supported at all.
One problem with AssocQueryString is that on older operating systems (NT4, 98, 95),
it isn't available unless Internet Explorer 5 (or higher) is installed. The
class automatically tests for this, to avoid triggering an error, by looking to
see if the function is exported from the shwapi dynamic link library.
