Joe White's Blog Life, .NET, and cats

Explorer Bar control #.NET

Found an article on CodeProject about a theme-aware but not theme-dependent Explorer bar (the sidebar you see in Explorer windows in Windows XP). It picks up the current theme if you're running XP, but falls back to a reasonable look-and-feel in pre-XP OSes (not the first to do that, although I like this one's pre-XP look).

I'm just guessing when I call this an Explorer bar; I don't know what the official terminology is. The author calls it a "taskbar", which it obviously is not; this goes on the side of a window, not the bottom of the screen. But aside from the naming issues, it looks pretty good. He's incorporated several suggestions from readers; for example, instead of sliding the panes open at a constant speed, someone suggested making the motion more like a cosine curve, and it looks like he incorporated that into the control. Looks like it should be a pretty nice control. I'll have to actually download it sometime...