If you are using Shell objects there are lots of properties you can retrieve describing the filesystem and individual files. However the values returned are often types that VB is not prepared to cope with without some help.
Here we'll look at one of the Volume properties that gives you the capacity and free space for each drive in ssfDrives.
This program fetches the Drives Folder (ssfDrives) and retrieves the PKEY_Computer_DecoratedFreeSpace (as SCID_Computer_DecoratedFreeSpace).
The returned value is a PROPVARIANT, so we first convert it to a Variant for use in VB6.
The PROPVARIANT is empty or a "VT_VECTOR | VT_UI8" value, so if not empty we recast it as "VT_ARRAY | VT_CURRENCY" which is something we can play with in VB6.
Update:
Then we format these values (1.) using normal techniques after scaling by 10000 to convert from our pseudo-Currency values to whole numbers, or (2.) by calling StrFormatByteSize() which produces abbreviated formats in KB, MB, GB, TB units.
You could probably also use PKEY_FreeSpace and PKEY_Capacity in separate calls of the ExtendedProperty() method, but I haven't tested that.
See the program comments: this code won't work before Vista except on XP SP2 or later with Windows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.0 or later installed. Those old systems do not have propsys.dll in them.
Update:
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Here we'll look at one of the Volume properties that gives you the capacity and free space for each drive in ssfDrives.
This program fetches the Drives Folder (ssfDrives) and retrieves the PKEY_Computer_DecoratedFreeSpace (as SCID_Computer_DecoratedFreeSpace).
The returned value is a PROPVARIANT, so we first convert it to a Variant for use in VB6.
The PROPVARIANT is empty or a "VT_VECTOR | VT_UI8" value, so if not empty we recast it as "VT_ARRAY | VT_CURRENCY" which is something we can play with in VB6.
Update:
It seems that VB6 can coerce these particular PROPVARIANTs to Variants itself. This saves an API call that isn't available in most pre-Vista Windows installations.
Then we format these values (1.) using normal techniques after scaling by 10000 to convert from our pseudo-Currency values to whole numbers, or (2.) by calling StrFormatByteSize() which produces abbreviated formats in KB, MB, GB, TB units.
You could probably also use PKEY_FreeSpace and PKEY_Capacity in separate calls of the ExtendedProperty() method, but I haven't tested that.
See the program comments: this code won't work before Vista except on XP SP2 or later with Windows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.0 or later installed. Those old systems do not have propsys.dll in them.
Update:
No longer a restriction.