How can an application display an object on the Windows taskbar?

There are several applications around that display objects o开发者_Go百科n the Windows taskbar but do no implement the IDeskBand interface. For example, the Lenovo batter meter and Notebook BatteryInfo.

For example:

Notebook BatteryInfo http://home.arcor.de/batteryinfogateway/img/taskbar_new.png

In the picture above, the object on the taskbar is put there by the application and disappears when the application closes. This is different than IDeskBand in which the COM object is loaded directly by explorer.exe.

What API/Method can be used in Windows to accomplish that?

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It's called "appbars". You'll need to write a module using Shell API and have the user register it with Shell. Please not that in case the user is running x64 OS, your module also needs to be 64-bit, which generally means that when you distribute your utility, there has to be both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of it.

Win7 has a much more flexible interface for this, called "taskbar extensions"