creating a deskband (WMP style taskbar toolbar) in vb net

Question

I have searched and searched how to do this but everything leads back to Appbars (dockable forms) which is not what i need.

I want a toolbar that goes into the taskbar, like WMP, itunes, language toolbar.

Preferably in vbnet, but if its in C# then thats fine.

Answer 1

You should not be writing shell extensions in a managed language at all , even if some online examples show how to do it. Mainly because only one CLR can be loaded per process. So once your extension is loaded into explorer.exe , anybody else's extension specifying a different .net version won't load. And vice versa, of course, if your extension is not the first one to load.

See Raymond Chen's blog for more info.

Answer 2

I found this on the codeproject. It is in C#, but you could always make it Vb.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/dotnetbandobjects.aspx