Opening files with default Windows application from within emacs

Question

I\'m trying to tweak the dired-find-file function in emacs on Windows XP so that when I open (say) a pdf file from dired it fires up a copy of Acrobat Reader and op

Answer 1

Tom Smith's answer is nice, but you can also just run the program "start" with the filename as an argument.

(shell-command (concat "start " (shell-quote-argument filename)))