I’ve decided to publish this on CodeProject. In fact this is my very first code project article, so please be nice. You can view the article here: WPF Fallback Brush.

Although Microsoft released a Windows 7 Code Pack, allowing you to leverage the great new taskbar features in Windows 7, as well as many of the new Windows 7 features. There wasn’t really an easy way to do this through XAML. I’m quite happy to see this now in WPF4, and how easy it is to enable these taskbar goodies for your WPF applications. I’m going to just start off with talking about two apparent features that I’m sure most developers would like to bring to their applications: Taskbar Progress and Taskbar Overlays.

Taskbar Progress

For the early and recent adopters, you may have noticed that the taskbar buttons are now more richer in terms of the feedback that’s shown to users. One of those is progress updates. This is particularly useful when you have a long running operation, like a copy/move operation, where you would usually minimize the window to (at least, that’s what I do), and you also want to quickly see how it’s doing.

This is what an explorer copy and paste operation looks like:

It’s really useful to see the progress of a long running operation without having to restore or bring it back into focus.

In order to enable your applications to report progress to the taskbar, you will be required to add this feature into your applications.

Fortunately, WPF 4 now introduces a generic taskbar item class(TaskbarItemInfo) that allows you to configure this. If you want to configure your application to have an indeterminate progress, you simply have to set the TaskbarItemInfo.ProgressState to Indeterminate.

<Window.TaskbarItemInfo>
    <TaskbarItemInfo ProgressState="Indeterminate" />
</Window.TaskbarItemInfo>

And this is what it ends up looking like:

If your application can determine the remaining progress, you can choose to set the ProgressState to Normal, and then within your code, whether it be through the code behind, a command, or whatever it may be, you can then set the property ProgressValue on the TaskbarItemInfo. The ProgressValue property takes values between 0.0 to 1.0.

There is a few other enum values on the ProgressState which you can explore with TaskbarItemProgressState.

Taskbar Overlays

Another great feature that Windows 7 has introduced into the taskbar is the notion of overlays. In a nut shell, they are simple icons that are displayed on top of the taskar icon. It’s also extremely trivial to enable for your application. Following from the same code sample from above, we simply set another property on the TaskbarItemInfo:

<Window.TaskbarItemInfo>
    <TaskbarItemInfo Overlay="Green.ico" />
</Window.TaskbarItemInfo>

And the result is:

There is so much more to cover with the new Windows 7 taskbar integration features that WPF 4 brings to us. I’ll blog more about it soon.

Here’s what my new camera set looks like (snapped with my Canon IXUS 85IS):

Canon EOS 500D

Consisting of: Canon DSLR EOS 500D Body 18-55mm f3.5 – f 5 Lens 55-200mm f4.5 – f5 Lens Canon EOS Camera bag

Here are a few shots I just I quickly took with my new toy, it’s relatively easy to take nice shots with DSLR’s:

My Desk!	Sexy Mouse
55-250mm Lens	Channel 9 Guy

Once I get the hang of this camera, I’ll soon become a flickr addict!

If only development was so easy, then the process of developing a solution will be something along the lines of this (in fact, I think it’s what most managers want in the future):

• Gather Requirements
• Determine Required Controls
• Drag and Drop Controls
• Configure Controls
• Test and Deploy Solution.

Don’t get me wrong, I use controls, but it’s definitely not the first thing I head to when developing a solution, mainly because of a variety of factors:

• May only require 1% of what the control does.
• Cost factors.
• Control (no pun intended), I tend to like a bit more control of things, I know some vendors provide source, but not all.
• Learning curve, this depends, I’ve dealt with some nice controls in the past, which took little time to grasp.
• I like to learn how to make things, I’m sure everyone does as well.