I'm interested in creating an application that actually runs in the
start menu. For example, a program to display the weather in my area,
then when I click on the start menu there would be an icon called
Weather and it would display the current temperature automatically
without me clicking on it.
Possible or not?
Links to articles if possible?
As far as I know, the left pane can only contains shortcuts, so these cannot
be used to provide dynamic information, except maybe through some trick like
adding a shortcut which icon is modified everytime the information needs to
be updated, and forcing the shell to refresh its imagelist to update the
image in the start menu.
The right panel on the other hand contains shell folders (COM objects), and
is designed to be able to host an OEM item at the bottom:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/resou...Guidelines: Windows XP Start Menu and Desktop
The standard Windows OEM Preinstallation Kit typically just asks for a
target, name, infotip and icon, and build a shortcut-like object with these
using the shdocvw.dll server.
I never tried to do anything more advanced, but as it seems to be based on
shell folders COM interfaces, maybe building an alternate shell folder with
the OEM logo classID {2559a1f6-21d7-11d4-bdaf-00c04f60b9f0} would allow you
to update its icon, label, infotip, contextual menu, and behavior when
clicked.
I would start at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/e...de/shell_adv/namespaceextension/namespace.asp
A shell folder can update its icon, at least through the registry and a
shell image update request, but I would check if there isn't any cleaner way
through the shell folders interfaces. Then coding on that does it every 10
seconds and see if the Start menu updates its display.
If that works, you might just have a solution to get that weather
information as an icon and status text shown in the start menu.
