shell32.dll access

Rudolf Meier 271

Hi...

Little question about how this works... and why Visual Studio does this.

When you open the shell32.dll from an application (e.g. your own), you get pretty much what you see in the explorer... same size, same everything... and when you copy this one first to another drive... same stuff... there's the 64bit/32bit SysWow64 stuff... that's clear too... no problem. But... there's not in the file what I expect... and... when you open it with Visual Studio (this show's you the resources inside this dll), then... you get a completely different file... where does it come from and why is that? ... and why is Visual Studio accessing it this way? (in the file open dialog you still have what you expect) ... must be some redirection virtualization stuff... but I don't remember how exactely it works...

thanks
Rudolf

Strive Sun-MSFT 426 Reputation points

2021-04-08T09:50:52.767+00:00

Hello, @Rudolf Meier

Does this answer your question?
Rudolf Meier 271 Reputation points

2021-04-08T11:35:19.943+00:00

unfortunatelly not... there is more than just those 2 folders... or, I didn't understand it

but, try this yourself... copy the shell32.dll from system32 and syswow64 to another drive... then open them in Visual Studio... you'll see 2 different files... and then open it directly from the system32 directory and... it's a third version...

why? or... as I said... maybe I don't realize something here and I see the same things or make another mistake... whatever... :-)