Emulate a hard drive in .NET.

Question

Is there a way to emulate a drive in .NET by intercepting read / write / lock operations? I would like to create something with an interface similar to GMail Drive in C #.

Thanks Tom

Answer 1

I use the Eldos Callback File System for this purpose, but although it’s good, it’s not really cheap.

There are some free / cheap projects, and I’m sure that one of them was mentioned in a similar question about SO recently - it can no longer find it at the moment. Stability is usually a serious problem, however, because layered Windows file system drivers are not trivial.

Answer 2

On Linux, you can use the Mono.Fuse API ( http://www.jprl.com/Projects/mono-fuse.html ) to implement .NET-based file systems with custom ground code.

Answer 3

You could see how http://www.truecrypt.org/ does it. This is done using files or using a disk or partition. And then it mounts the file as if it were a real drive. Now, it is possible that the source code is a bit complicated;)

Answer 4

Not very .NET sits on top of OS functionality such as disk access to provide you with things like managed files. You can write all this in managed C #, but you will need unmanaged calls to make the OS treat it like another disk.

All materials of the COM shell extension: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc147467(VS.85).aspx

However, you could write a .NET desktop application that allowed drag and drop from Explorer and looked like a kind of file system.

Answer 5

You can also use EZNamespaceExtension for .NET . This gives you integration with Windows Explorer. Not too expensive, given that the license depends on the developer, and not on the distribution.

Update A big problem with EZNamespaceExtension.NET. It has not been updated for a long time. LogicNP seems to have lost interest in EZNamespaceExtension.NET because there have been no releases with new features since 2010. .NET 4 Support and Windows 8 Ribbon Support

Answer 6

I just checked the EZNamespaceExtension for .NET with the link above. It seems like they are constantly updating the 2013 release version. But I'm not sure that I can answer the question "Show as a disk in Explorer.exe (AFAIK. It can not be displayed as a drive letter)