The new graphical desktop shell is included in the main code base ReactOS

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 to compatibility (Explorer-new written with an eye to Windows 2003), functionality and usability.


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Initially, ReactOS did not have a graphical shell at all, but it appeared only a little later, namely in release 0.2.0. The author of this shell was Martin Fuchs, and it was originally done 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 on the development of the shell32 library used to display the graphical user shell. First of all, this decision is related to the fact that for the work of Wine there is no need to support the full Explorer shell infrastructure, since the main work environment for Wine is Linux, which already has its own graphical shell, such as KDE or Gnome. Therefore, the developers used only a part of the Wine components and imported them into ReactOS.



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



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

Ps . There is a new way to support the project - setting a reward for fixing a specific bug on the Bountysource .
PPS And we can also put a “cash” like in Flattr .
PPPS Taking this opportunity, we want to thank UA-Hosting , which has been donating and maintaining a powerful dedicated server for our project for a year now. We also thank Rusonyx for donating to us the DELL 2950 server.