CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netwindowstaskbar
Matthew Scharley
Matthew Scharley

Reputation: 132464

How do I create a toolbar for the Taskbar on Windows?

How do I go about creating my own taskbar toolbar, a la Windows Media Player:

Windows Media Player's Start bar toolbar http://me.monoxide.ws/images/wmp-toolbar.gif

Examples or documentation or even open source software that implements this for just about any language would be appreciated, but Google isn't being very helpful. Ultimately, I would like to do this in C# (I expect to need P/Invoke) for XP onwards, but any language and Vista onwards would be acceptable/helpful too.

Upvotes: 15

Views: 5512

Answers (2)

user142019
user142019

Reputation:

Check this out:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharplanguage/thread/e180c4d5-8cd7-47e3-b45a-d643c02bab36

alt text
(source: microsoft.com)

It's called as "Desk Band"

See MSDN desription about this http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/shell/programmersguide/shell_adv/bands.asp and sample over there http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/dotnetbandobjects.asp

By the way, thanks for asking this question. Back in the days I also wanted to do this. However, yesterday I said bye bye to Windows and Hi to Mac. If you asked this yesterday I would upvote it trice if I could ;-)

Upvotes: 9

Kate Gregory
Kate Gregory

Reputation: 18974

You'll notice that Media Player on Win7 doesn't have a desk band. Instead it has tiny play/pause buttons in the thumbnail preview that appears when you mouse over the taskbar icon. You can do the same thing for your application. If you use Code Pack (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack) there is a sample under Samples\Shell\ThumbnailToolbarDemo. Windows 7 only, but way less annoying than taking up an inch or two of taskbar, and just as handy when you want to insta-pause.

Upvotes: 1

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