Windows 98 is the culmination of many improvements to what is now a fully-fledged, 32-bit, COM-based operating system. With suitable instruction, you can push the Windows shell to performing complex actions, and customize it using C++/ATL programs. Until now, the documentation for Windows shell programming has been poor. This book is about telling you exactly how to use the tools available, and when each tool is appropriate. There's coverage of the Windows API, the Windows Scripting Host, and shell and namespace extensions that use ATL and the shell's COM object model. Information on these topics at this level has been scarce, but the author brings them all together in this volume.