Well, this is not completely impossible. You need to pinvoke SHCreateItemFromParsingName() to obtain an IShellItem2 interface pointer so you can call its GetProperty() method. To get this going in C# is however quite brutal. The shell interfaces are in the domain of native C++, the only language in which you can get the COM declarations and guids you need to bring this to a good end. After 4 major releases of .NET, we're still no closer to make shell programming in a managed language any easier. Good keywords to google for though, somebody somewhere made this work.
