Select folder dialog WPF

I wrote about it on my blog a long time ago, WPF's support for common file dialogs is really bad (or at least is was in 3.5 I didn't check in version 4) - but it's easy to work around it.

You need to add the correct manifest to your application - that will give you a modern style message boxes and folder browser (WinForms FolderBrowserDialog) but not WPF file open/save dialogs, this is described in those 3 posts (if you don't care about the explanation and only want the solution go directly to the 3rd):

• Why am I Getting Old Style File Dialogs and Message Boxes with WPF
• Will Setting a Manifest Solve My WPF Message Box Style Problems?
• The Application Manifest Needed for XP and Vista Style File Dialogs and Message Boxes with WPF

Fortunately, the open/save dialogs are very thin wrappers around the Win32 API that is easy to call with the right flags to get the Vista/7 style (after setting the manifest)

• Vista style open and save dialogs with WPF (without using the Vista bridge sample)

Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook by Pavel Yosifovich on page 155 in the section on "Using the common dialog boxes" says:

"What about folder selection (instead of files)? The WPF OpenFileDialog does not support that. One solution is to use Windows Forms' FolderBrowseDialog class. Another good solution is to use the Windows API Code Pack described shortly."

I downloaded the API Code Pack from Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework Windows API Code Pack: Where is it?, then added references to Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.dll and Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Shell.dll to my WPF 4.5 project.

Example:

using Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Dialogs;

var dlg = new CommonOpenFileDialog();
dlg.Title = "My Title";
dlg.IsFolderPicker = true;
dlg.InitialDirectory = currentDirectory;

dlg.AddToMostRecentlyUsedList = false;
dlg.AllowNonFileSystemItems = false;
dlg.DefaultDirectory = currentDirectory;
dlg.EnsureFileExists = true;
dlg.EnsurePathExists = true;
dlg.EnsureReadOnly = false;
dlg.EnsureValidNames = true;
dlg.Multiselect = false;
dlg.ShowPlacesList = true;

if (dlg.ShowDialog() == CommonFileDialogResult.Ok) 
{
  var folder = dlg.FileName;
  // Do something with selected folder string
}

Add The Windows API Code Pack-Shell to your project

using Microsoft.WindowsAPICodePack.Dialogs;

...

var dialog = new CommonOpenFileDialog();
dialog.IsFolderPicker = true;
CommonFileDialogResult result = dialog.ShowDialog();