(Tool)Band Aid
So, I recently completed writing a Desk band for windows. What is a desk band, you ask? Well, your windows start bar is the home for several desk band objects. These are basically COM objects that support a bunch of interfaces and register themselves in appropriate places so that windows knows to load them. In short, you register your windows class and it gets put in the toolbar. Nearly the same code can work in multiple places in IE, Explorer, and in the Start Bar. So, I learned a few lessons: It is far easier to do your initial development so the band will work in the IE toolbar than in the start bar. This lets just run the COM object (and automatically start IE) rather than manually starting up the desk band, and attaching to the Explorer process. When you get most of what you need done, you can test it in the Start bar. A conditional compilation switch in your code will make sure that you don't accidentally register the release version of your desk band object to run in IE (if...