New desktop graphical shell included in ReactOS core codebase

A month after the release of version 0.3.17, we finally fulfilled our promise : ReactOS adopted a new implementation of the Explorer graphical shell, which was developed as part of the Explorer-new project. You can test the new interface using daily test builds . The new shell allowed ReactOS to take a step forward towards compatibility (Explorer-new is written with an eye on Windows 2003), functionality and usability.





Initially, ReactOS did not have a graphical shell at all, but it appeared only a little later, namely in the release 0.2.0. The author of this shell was Martin Fuchs, and it was originally made incorrectly in terms of its software architecture. In the early years of the project, it was decided to abandon the dependency on the Wine project regarding the development of the shell32 library used to display a graphical user shell. First of all, this decision is connected with the fact that Wine does not need to maintain the infrastructure of a full Explorer shell, since Wine is the main environment for Linux, which already has its own graphical shell, such as KDE or Gnome. Therefore, developers used only part of the Wine components and imported them into ReactOS.



Work on the new shell was started by Thomas Blumel, as a prototype, he chose Explorer 2003 and did a lot of work to differentiate the functionality between Explorer and Shell32. But due to the lack of a “correct” Shell32 library, the new version of Explorer has not yet worked. Later, Andrew Hill borrowed and finalized some of the libraries from Wine, and Yannis Adamopoulos documented the work of Explorer in Windows itself. David Quintana finished his work, and now Explorer-new has finally replaced the old version in daily builds and requires additional testing. The final stage took David for almost a year.



By the way, David Quintana was previously known as a key developer of the pcsx2 project , a PS2 console emulator.

PS. There is a new way to support the project - setting a reward for fixing a specific bug on Bountysource .
PPS And we can also put a "money" like in Flattr .
PPPS Taking this opportunity, we want to thank UA-Hosting , which has been providing and servicing a powerful dedicated server for our project for free already for a year . We also thank Rusonyx for donating the DELL 2950 server .