Taskbar buttons reorder utility
Since the start of my professional career, I had always liked the taskbar buttons in the Windows Taskbar to be in a specific order. Like mostly, the first application in my taskbar is the MS Outlook, then my to-do list in notepad, and then applications I am working on (vary from time to time and project to project). Some time it happens that I anciently close any of these applications, and then keep frustrating on the application order until I restart/logout my machine and makes thing appear in the same order again.
I always wished for a utility to reorder the taskbar buttons, and I even once sent this as a UI feature to the Microsoft support. Recently when frustrated again by the order, I searched the web for a third party utility to do the same and to my surprise there were couple of applications which do that. I remember that I didn’t found similar application a couple of years ago (may be I didn’t search for the correct terms then). Anyway, as this was one of my original idea (believe me), so I instead of going to use any of the existing utility, I tried to create one of my own from scratch. Though it was more like reinventing the wheel (with no good for public), but it was a good learning experience for me, especially in the uncharted waters of the Win32 API.
I will soon be sharing that utility and any finding, tips and tricks I learned when developing it. Her are some of the related links which were really of help to me (and will be to you if you like to develop similar utility from scratch too or just want to know how to do it):
http://www.codeproject.com/listctrl/jianghong.asp
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb760435.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997537.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/gdi/mousecapture.asp?df=100&forumid=412&exp=0&select=1706750
More details tips and tricks are coming soon. So stay tuned.
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on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Win32 API.
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Greg,
Thanks for the link. Yes, I explored it. It does the basic job, but then you have to open an application dialog to do this and it doesn’t correctly recognize the task order.
I later found some other applications which do this using drag and drop and one of them was actually free too, but I was able to develop my own by then.
Check it out here:
http://blog.syedgakbar.com/2007/11/10/i-launch-first-version-of-taskbar-ext/
New version is coming soon!
This isn’t mine.. but I suspect this is what you are looking for: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/tbarsort.aspx