Displaying an Open File dialog is certainly easy in the Microsoft~(~R) .NET Framework with Windows* Forms, but the resulting window is not as customizable as when you create it through the Win32~(~R) API. With Windows 2000, Microsoft added a nice feature―the places bar, which is the vertical toolbar that appears on the left side of the window to let you select a frequently visited folder. As you can see in Figure 1, the places bar contains buttons to take the user directly to five folders―History, Desktop, My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places. When coding against the Open File common dialog in the Win32 API, you can set a style to hide the places bar. But like other features of the Win32 common dialogs, this setting seems to have gotten lost in the migration to the .NET Framework. Creating a common dialog has never been easier than it is in the Framework, but this simplicity comes at the cost of some flexibility. In addition, in managed code there is no way to extend the layout of the dialog with additional controls.
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