One of the problems I ran into when I started looking at converting PeteSearch from a Firefox plugin to an Internet Explorer extension was finding good example code. There are a couple of great articles on MSDN that cover how to write a BHO, but neither include complete source code. Here’s the list of all the code samples I managed to find, and a couple I wrote myself:
A very simple skeleton BHO that I wrote:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2007/05/porting_firefox_1.html
A more complex example based on my Firefox add-on:
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2007/06/porting-firefox.html
From Sven Groot, the source to his FindAsYouType extension:
http://www.ookii.org/software/findasyoutype/
http://www.ookii.org/download.ashx?id=FindAsYouTypeSrc
The SurfHelper pop-up blocker from Xiaolin Zhang:
http://www.codeproject.com/shell/surfhelper.asp
A simple example covering all the BHO events from René Nyffenegger:
http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/win/com/bho.html
Pete Warden's blog 
Pete,
Amazing Posts.
These are by far the most informative and explanatory posts related to creating BHOs I can find online. I cant tell you how much I’m waiting to see how to build a good installer. I’ve followed you so far through this and I’ve got PeteSearch building off Visual C Express, and running in my IE7.
Thanks again, and please do post your installer code when you get something up and running.
Also, I haven’t looked into it much yet, but how much space does the Boost runtime add to the msi/exe? I’ve got a BHO written in C# but I want to port it to C++ to save people the 27MB dl for the .NET 1.1 runtime. Is Boost any better on the size front?
Thanks,
Stephen
Pete,
One other question? Have you found a solution to the IE reload detection problem? As you probably are finding out, the DocumentComplete event is not fired on Reload/Refresh actions. How are you going about capturing a Reload? I’ve seen many elaborate schemes that include catching downloadbegins, downloadcompletes with counters, semaphores, and threads with a lot of Sleep calls in them, but i haven’t found any that get the job done.
Thanks,
Stephen
Thanks Stephen, it’s great to hear this is helping!
When building a ‘minimum dependency’ release build (which should statically link as much as possible into the DLL), PeteSearch is around 280k. It was 20-30k before I added boost I think, so it’s not too bad. I need to verify that I haven’t introduced any other dll dependencies I’ll also need to install, but I’ve tried to avoid that.
And yes, I’m dreading the DocumentComplete handling on refresh! I don’t have a good handle on that yet, but I get the feeling it will be interesting, to say the least.
Resources of IE extension developing