Windows 7 Taskbar Progress Bar with C# and .NET

[Vorenus]

Hey guys,

I've created a control that allows you to easily add the Windows 7 taskbar progress bars to .NET programs. It's all in my blog post "Windows 7 Taskbar Progress Bar with C# and .NET".

Here's the progress bar being used with wyBuild creating update patches for Nero:

Here's the progress bar being used with wyUpdate installing an update:

Also, the progress bar is completely backwards compatible:

I didn't want this post to sound too spammy, but I figured there are lots of .NET programmers on this board that might like this and there are no adverts on my blog. Also the component is completely open source (C#) with example projects in both C# and VB.NET.

Here's my article: Windows 7 Taskbar Progress Bar with C# and .NET

Tell me what you guys think.

[micro]

Nice, very informative and will help some developers for sure.

[Malisk]

Looks great and a thorough control with good attention to detail! :)

[Vorenus]

  micro said:

Nice, very informative and will help some developers for sure.

  Jugalator said:

Looks great and a thorough control with good attention to detail! :)

Thanks guys.

[todd]

  Vorenus said:

It looks great. Thanks for this! What controls are you using in this screenshot? Are they all private or publicly available?

[ajua]

Thanks for the info.

I'm starting to develop for the new Windows 7 features and this will come handy.

[Vorenus]

  todd said:

It looks great. Thanks for this! What controls are you using in this screenshot? Are they all private or publicly available?

Most of the controls are privately developed by my company, but some will be released in the near future. The only controls in the screenshot that are open source are VistaMenu and the Windows 7 Progress Bar.

I plan on releasing the tab bar on my blog in the coming months.

[DigitalE]

I'd love to see something like this in Firefox.

[Lee G. Veteran]

Thanks! :)

[Gary2MBz]

If someone could do such for Firefox's Download Manager and DownThemAll! I would appreciate it greatly. The green would be normal downloading, marquee being scanning for viruses, yellow for pause, and red for failure. DTA would be the same except the marquee would be used for when it merges the pieces. Catch my drift?

[Vorenus]

  Shunik Jan said:

If someone could do such for Firefox's Download Manager and DownThemAll! I would appreciate it greatly. The green would be normal downloading, marquee being scanning for viruses, yellow for pause, and red for failure. DTA would be the same except the marquee would be used for when it merges the pieces. Catch my drift?

Quite honestly, this will likely be done in C++ not C#. Also, the Mozilla devs aren't prowling the neowin programming forum. You'd be better off submitting a feature request directly to Mozilla.

At the very least you could mention it over at the Firefox forum: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23

[BGM]

very nice! bookmarked :)

[code.kliu.org]

  Vorenus said:

Quite honestly, this will likely be done in C++ not C#. Also, the Mozilla devs aren't prowling the neowin programming forum. You'd be better off submitting a feature request directly to Mozilla.

Should be submitted to Bugzilla, but I suspect that there is already an item there because I know this is one of the things on the to-do list.

In Mozilla, this has to be done in C++ and interfaced through XPCOM; should be a fairly simple and mostly trivial thing to do, actually. Once there is an interface for this in XPCOM, both the Firefox UI (as well as any extension) would be able to make use of it.

[Ci7]

  code.kliu.org said:

Should be submitted to Bugzilla, but I suspect that there is already an item there because I know this is one of the things on the to-do list.

In Mozilla, this has to be done in C++ and interfaced through XPCOM; should be a fairly simple and mostly trivial thing to do, actually. Once there is an interface for this in XPCOM, both the Firefox UI (as well as any extension) would be able to make use of it.

I think i heard Mozilla intending to remove XPCOM in the near future

[MtnDewCodeRedFreak]

I agree - this is a very nice feature.

Hmm what about a blue color along with the red, green, and yellow? Then it'd fit so nicely with the Windows flag logo.

[code.kliu.org]

  skynetXrules said:

I think i heard Mozilla intending to remove XPCOM in the near future

No. That was never in the plans, and wouldn't be possible because XPCOM (through XPConnect) is how JavaScript (which drives the UI) is able to access the low-level C++ Gecko internals. There has to be some sort of interface, and XPCOM actually makes quite a lot of sense here. What is being done is "deCOMtamination", which is the process by which some internal-use classes that don't need to be (and never should have been) exposed as an API are being converted from COM into regular C++ classes.

  MtDewCodeRedFreak said:

Hmm what about a blue color along with the red, green, and yellow? Then it'd fit so nicely with the Windows flag logo.

You can't specify the color. You can only specify a state, and Windows picks the color for you. It's not "here is a yellow bar that you can use if you want to indicate pause". It's "you can indicate to the system that the bar is paused, and Windows will set the color and animation appropriately, which, in this case, is yellow" (and it's not just a color change; that shiny strobe thingie will stop animating as well if you pause).

[Vorenus]

That's exactly right, code.kliu.org. In fact I wrote it in the demo VB.NET and C# projects so there wouldn't be any confusion:

[Panda X]

In the MSStyles the Marquee is called Indeterminate, is it called Marquee elsewhere?

[Vorenus]

  Panda X said:

In the MSStyles the Marquee is called Indeterminate, is it called Marquee elsewhere?

Yes, in the Windows Forms "Style" property. Microsoft uses "indeterminate" and "marquee" interchangeably.

[Calum Veteran]

Oh, nice! Thanks :) I'll definately be checking this out when I have some time :yes:

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

  code.kliu.org said:

Should be submitted to Bugzilla, but I suspect that there is already an item there because I know this is one of the things on the to-do list.

...

Yep, Bug 474060, there's some patches attached to it.

[bogas04]

  code.kliu.org said:

No. That was never in the plans, and wouldn't be possible because XPCOM (through XPConnect) is how JavaScript (which drives the UI) is able to access the low-level C++ Gecko internals. There has to be some sort of interface, and XPCOM actually makes quite a lot of sense here. What is being done is "deCOMtamination", which is the process by which some internal-use classes that don't need to be (and never should have been) exposed as an API are being converted from COM into regular C++ classes.

he read it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#Version_4.0

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

That says they're removing some API's, but even then the quote is from 2006 (it mentions Tamarin)