Preview Handlers in Vista and Outlook

I have been meaning to blog about this for a long time.  Tim Heuer wrote a great code preview handler that I realized has become an integral part of my daily use of Vista and Outlook.

When you enable the preview panel in Vista, you can get a preview of some files on the file system.  Tim wrote a specialized one that will display C# code in a nice color format.  Here's a picture to show you what I mean.  Instead of opening up Visual Studio to look at the code, I can just click on it in explorer and preview the file.

OK, that's a pretty cool timesaver. 

I am subscribed to several dozen distribution lists related to .NET development within Microsoft.  I am forever seeing people attach a since .cs file to an email, and usually I have to open the file from the attachment and view it in Visual Studio.  Because the preview handler works for both Vista and Outlook, I get a preview experience in Outlook as well.

For me, that's a huge timesaver.

Go to Tim's blog and read how he did it, get the source, or get the MSI installer.