I spent a while working this one out and none of the google hits  showed me what I needed so I thought I'd blog it here. When you hook the Drop event how do you deal with multiple files being dropped? The GetData("FileNameW") member only returns a single file name in the string array even if multiple files are being dragged. GetData("FileName") returns a single file name in 8.3 compatible munged form so that doesn't help. I looked in the help for System.Windows.DataObject and it has a GetFileDropList member. However, it turns out that the DragDropEventArgs.Data is an IDataObject not a DataObject. So if you cast it to a DataObject you get access to the file list

if (e.Data.GetFormats().Contains("FileDrop"))
{
    DataObject dataObject = e.Data as DataObject;
    StringCollection files =null;
    if (dataObject !=null)
    {
        files = dataObject.GetFileDropList();
    }
    else
    {
        // not sure if this is necessary but its defensive coding
        string[] fileArray = (string[])e.Data.GetData("FileNameW");
        files =new StringCollection();
        files.Add(fileArray[0]);
    }

    foreach (string file in files)
    {
        // process files
    }
}

Hopefully someone else looking how to do this will stumble across this blog post and save some time

I've added drag and drop support to the BlobExplorer (announced here) so you can drag files from windows explorer into cloud blob storage

Rather than maintain the application in multiple places all releases will now go to the cloud here

I will finally submit to Dominick's harrassment and stop running Visual Studio elevated. I started doing it because I couldn't be bothered to mess about with HttpCfg and netsh when writing self-hosted WCF apps exposed over HTTP. Registering part of the HTTP namespace with http.sys requires admin privilege. I could have sorted it out with a wildcard registration but never got round to it.

Since writing the BlobExplorer, Christian has been my major source of feature requests. His latest was he wanted drag and drop. Now I'm not an expert in WPF so I hit google to find out how to do it. And it seemed really simple - just set AllowDrop=true on the UIElement in question and handle the Drop event. But I just couldn't get the app to accept drag events from Windows Explorer. After much frustration I finally realised that the problem had nothing to do with my code but was rather a security issue. the BlobExplorer was running elevated because I started it from Visual Studio which was also running elevated. Elevated applications will not accept drag events from non-elevated applications.

So I'm setting VS to run normally again and will do the proper thing with http.sys for my WCF applications.

I've uploaded an updated version of the BlobExplorer (first blogged about here). It now uses a decent algorithm for determining MIME type (thanks Christian) and the blob list now retains a single entry when you update an existing blob

Downloadable from my website here

BlobExplorer12.zip (55.28 KB)

downloadable from Azure Blob Storage here

I've been digging around in Azure Storage recently and as a side project I decided to write an explorer for Blob Storage. My UI skills are not my strongest suit but I had fun dusting off my WPF knowledge (I have to thank Andy Clymer, Dave "no blog" Wheeler and Ian Griffiths for nursemaiding me through some issues)

Here is a screen shot of the explorer attached to development storage. You can also attach it to your hosted Azure storage in the cloud

In the spirit of cloud storage and dogfooding I used the Blob Explorer to upload itself into the cloud so you can find it here

However, as Azure is a CTP environment I thought I would also upload it here

BlobExplorer1.zip (55.08 KB)

as, on the web, URIs live forever and my storage account URIs may not after the CTP. I hope someone gets some mileage out of it - I certainly enjoyed writing it. Comments, bug reports and feature requests are appreciated

As promised, here are the demos from the precon myself and Dave Wheeler (get a blog Dave) did at Software Architect 2008. It was a fun day talking about security, WCF, WF, Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, Ajax, ASP.NET MVC, LINQ and Oslo

DotNetForArchitects.zip (791.24 KB)

There is a text file in the demos directory in the zip that explains the role of each of the projects in the solution

Edit: Updated the download link so hopefully the problems people have been experiencing will be resolved

So I'm here at TechEd 2007 enjoying the humidity of Orlando in June. I delivered a Precon on WCF and WF on Sunday with Jon Flanders which was a blast. Mark Smith who writes our WPF course asked me to check out what I could find out about Acropolis - a new framework for creating WPF applications. The Acropolis website went live on Monday and so I wandered over to the boothe to see what I could find out. It came as quite a surprise that Dave Hill, who i used to work with in the UK about 8 years ago, was on the stall. Dave is the architect on Acropolis - its a small world. I had lunch with Dave and it looks like they have some interesting ideas for helping to enforce separation between the presentation layer and business funtionality in an application and it is all expressed declaratively in XAML. If you're building smart clients in WPF its definitely worth keeping an eye on.