The Old New Thing

Now that version 4 of the .NET Framework supports in-process side-by-side runtimes, is it now okay to write shell extensions in managed code?

Many years ago, I wrote, "Do not write in-process shell extensions in managed code." Since I originally wrote that article, version 4 of the .NET Framework was released, and one of the features of that version is that it supports in-process side-by-side runtimes. Does that mean that it's now okay to write shell extensions in managed code? ...

Isn’t the CompletionKey parameter to CreateIoCompletionPort superfluous?

When you associate a file handle with an I/O completion port with the function, you can pass an arbitrary pointer-sized integer called the which will be returned by the function for every I/O that completes against that file handle. But isn't that parameter superfluous? If somebody wanted to associated additional data with a file handle...