Junction points with network drives

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Ever wanted to create a 'junction point' style pointer but using a network drive as the source?  Now you can!

With Windows XP you can create junction points on your disks but the prerequisite is that the source point is on your local disk.  This is no good if you need to create the junction point that refers the user from a point that is anywhere else, for example a network drive.  This is actually very simple to do and has existed in Windows since Windows 98 (I think, but don't quote me on that...).  All you need to do is to create a desktop.ini file and a target.lnk file and you are all done.  The contents of the desktop.ini file should be:

[.ShellClassInfo]")
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}

 The target.lnk file you can either create manually or use the following VBS script:

 Set oWS = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
 sLinkFile = MYPATHFORFILE & "\target.lnk"
 Set oLink = oWS.CreateShortcut(sLinkFile)
 oLink.TargetPath = SOURCEPATHTOBEREDIRECTED
 oLink.WorkingDirectory = DESTINATION
 oLink.Save

The only downside is that this solution also has a prerequisite.  The application that you want to follow the redirection must use Shell32.dll for it's file handling.  Seeing as most applications now do this should not be too great a problem for you.