Professional Windows 7 Development Guide

Chapter 4. Interacting with the Taskbar

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding the new Windows 7 Taskbar

• Defining the Taskbar updates you want for your application

• Creating your first Taskbar-enhanced application

• Creating a Taskbar-enhanced application using the .NET 4.0 approach

• Making good design decisions for the Taskbar

The Taskbar is one Windows component that affects every application you run. Because the Taskbar is so visible, Microsoft has been tweaking it for years. Vista received a few major Taskbar changes, but Windows 7 has made significant changes to the Taskbar. Yes, older applications work fine, but the new Taskbar contains a wealth of features that you may want to add to older applications to improve their functionality (modifying an existing feature) or make them more functional (adding new features).

Note

You may not know it, but the Aero in Aero Glass is a bacronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open (http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/archive/b/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/09/the-sounds-of-windows-vista.aspx). What precisely is a bacronym? Well, it's a list of words used to define a term after the fact, as if the term started out as an acronym even though it was simply a word at one time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym). Aero Glass didn't start out as an acronym; the phrase was created after the fact by Microsoft marketing to match the Aero Glass terminology already in use. You may run into this terminology on a Microsoft site from time to time. No ...