How do I drag and drop files into an application?

I've seen this done in Borland's Turbo C++ environment, but I'm not sure how to go about it for a C# application I'm working on. Are there best practices or gotchas to look out for?

Some sample code:

  public partial class Form1 : Form {
    public Form1() {
      InitializeComponent();
      this.AllowDrop = true;
      this.DragEnter += new DragEventHandler(Form1_DragEnter);
      this.DragDrop += new DragEventHandler(Form1_DragDrop);
    }

    void Form1_DragEnter(object sender, DragEventArgs e) {
      if (e.Data.GetDataPresent(DataFormats.FileDrop)) e.Effect = DragDropEffects.Copy;
    }

    void Form1_DragDrop(object sender, DragEventArgs e) {
      string[] files = (string[])e.Data.GetData(DataFormats.FileDrop);
      foreach (string file in files) Console.WriteLine(file);
    }
  }

Be aware of windows vista/windows 7 security rights - if you are running Visual Studio as administrator, you will not be able to drag files from a non-administrator explorer window into your program when you run it from within visual studio. The drag related events will not even fire! I hope this helps somebody else out there not waste hours of their life...

In Windows Forms, set the control's AllowDrop property, then listen for DragEnter event and DragDrop event.

When the DragEnter event fires, set the argument's AllowedEffect to something other than none (e.g. e.Effect = DragDropEffects.Move).

When the DragDrop event fires, you'll get a list of strings. Each string is the full path to the file being dropped.

You need to be aware of a gotcha. Any class that you pass around as the DataObject in the drag/drop operation has to be Serializable. So if you try and pass an object, and it is not working, ensure it can be serialized as that is almost certainly the problem. This has caught me out a couple of times!