Determine underlying calls triggered by Windows GUI action

Question

This is a follow-up question to one I asked on superuser.com. How can I trace the consequences of GUI actions. Is there some kind of low level event log in windows?

Example If the user double-clicks on <name>.pdf, the consequences are:

• the extension is determined,
• the full path is determined
• the file is opened with the program associated with given extension

at least I assume that is what happens. That are the consequences I want to track in order to reproduce them in code.

Answer 1

There's no log that you can examine in order to reproduce events and behaviour of the shell.

In this case, a double click results in the default verb being applied to the selected shell item. In code you are provided with the ShellExecuteEx function to do that.