Professional Windows 7 Development Guide

Chapter 5. Advanced Taskbar Techniques

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Performing tasks, accessing documents, and going places using Jump Lists

• Showing application status using Progress Bars

• Controlling your application using a Thumbnail Toolbar

• Displaying immediate status using Overlay Icons

• Using control combinations to your advantage

• Defining a complete interface

This chapter looks at the various kinds of additions you can make to your application to help the user interact with it at the Taskbar. Of course, you won't want to add every possible feature to your application because that would overload the user and actually make the application less useful. Chapter 4 provides guidelines on how to use each of these features to best advantage.

You'll begin by using each of the Taskbar features individually. The chapter will then discuss how you can combine some Taskbar features to handle special needs. Finally, the chapter shows an application with several Taskbar features combined into a complete interface.

Note

You can use three different techniques to add Taskbar features to your application: Code Pack; Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML); and WPF code behind. Chapter 4 demonstrates all three of these techniques using a basic Jump List task application as an example. This chapter relies on the Code Pack technique because it allows the maximum number of readers to work with the examples, and because most readers aren't yet relying on WPF for application ...