VCSamples VS winfile

Microsoft used to distribute source code for a WordPad sample app with Visual Studio.

https://github.com/microsoft/VCSamples/tree/master/VC2010Sam...

from https://github.com/microsoft/VCSamples/tree/master/VC2010Sam...

"The WordPad sample demonstrates how to implement an application that imitates the functionality of WordPad, including the user interface elements and some of the capabilities."

I should have known it wasn't the real WordPad source code since this version is written using MFC and C++.

C++ was not an approved programming language for Win95 in its quest to run on Brad Silverberg's (Win95 manager) mom's 4MB RAM PC.

There are many samples of code using MFC and WinAPI at Microsoft's Github, although many follow practices that are now seen outdated (e.g. few of them use smart pointers).

It's written in MFC, and the sourcecode is on github (https://github.com/microsoft/VCSamples/tree/master/VC2010Sam...)

Ask and ye shall receive: https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

File Manager, or winfile.exe, was the predecessor to Explorer's file management aspects. You can use it on Windows 10 and 11 (and all the others) if you want to.

Program Manager, or progman.exe, was the predecessor shell to Explorer. It was included with Windows through Windows XP SP1 before finally being stubbed in SP2. You can probably grab the binary from XP SP1 and run it in newer Windows versions, though.

> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.

> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

There's always winfile lol. I wish they'd drop the 95 era file explorer source. That was the best one imo.

The ancient winfile (that get revived by microsoft), ctrl+shift drag to make symlink.

Joke comment: WinFile if you do not have Windows 11 22H2.

Here's the WinFile link, enjoy :) - https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile/

Good old Windows File Manager from the early 90s! In the Microsoft Store or github https://github.com/microsoft/winfile