Making an animated taskbar app

Question

Hi.

I have a HP notebook (running XP). I have seen on IBM computers, that they have a power-meter (it looks like a bar). It displays percentage of power left in battery. It is displayed in the taskbar. Not in the systemtray. Either on the left side or the right side of the potential language toolbar.

The application is animated, since the percentage of power (0-100%) chances. It fills up the bar with a green color according to the percentage. So half would be colored green if the power is down to 50%.

Now, since it is an IBM application for IBM notebooks, I want/need to make a copy of it.

My real question is though, how do I make an animated taskbar application?

Answer 1

What you are looking for is creating an Application Desktop Toolbar (also known as AppBar). The main function you use to register your application window as an AppBar is SHAppBarMessage.

To get you started, you can look at this old appbar example with C++. If you want to do it in C#, there's a thread that discusses some details on how to do it in WPF. I am not aware of examples of how to do it with WinForms, but a quick search on the web should bring something.

Update: Actually, if you want a toolbar that sits on the taskbar, you need to implement a Deskband. Here's a sample DeskBand in C++ and here's a DeskBand in C#.

That's what happens when you don't touch a topic in a while. :-)

Source:

This is actually an already answered question.