It looks like you can now license Office 2007 UI components, including the Ribbon. It’s a royalty-free license, but it prevents you from developing “products or components that perform primarily as software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, contacts and databases, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of them”. You know, just in-case you decide to develop a direct competitor to Office.

Offering these components to developers with this kind of license restriction is going to severely hinder adoption. Who in their right mind would let Microsoft have the final say on whether their application meets the license requirements? They may turn out to be very lenient about the types of applications that are valid under the license, but what developer would tie their software to these components when Microsoft can decide, at any time, that a product breaks the license agreement?

I understand that Microsoft put a huge amount of effort into developing the new UI, but why not offer the components as part of a new version of the Win32 Common Controls? Giving developers access to these new components can only benefit Microsoft (better Windows software equals more sales of Windows), and the best way to do that is to make them common controls.

When you’re a programmer, it seems like you learn something new every day. One of the things I’ve been working on in the next version of TopDesk is making it survive Explorer crashes. TopDesk has quite a few hooks into explorer.exe, so when Explorer goes down, TopDesk goes with it. After banging my head against the wall several times I managed to fix the problem, but I noticed that even with the fix in place the TopDesk system tray (sorry, taskbar notification area) icon failed to re-appear when Explorer came back to life.

What’s happening is that when Explorer crashes, the taskbar notification area crashes too, forgetting any icons it had. When Explorer starts back up, it re-creates the taskbar notification area and sends out a registered window message called (strangely enough) TaskbarCreated to all top-level windows. It’s up to an application to check for this message and re-initialize any taskbar notification area icons it has. Here’s how you do it in C/C++:

1. Register your application so it can receive TaskbarCreated messages:

UINT wmTaskbarCreated = RegisterWindowMessage(_T("TaskbarCreated"));

2. Handle the message in your window procedure:

LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProcedure(HWND hWnd, UINT nMessage, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
	switch(nMessage)
	{
	default:
		{
			if(nMessage == wmTaskbarCreated)
			{
				// Call your system tray icon initialization function/method here
			}
		}
		break;
	}

	return DefWindowProc(hWnd, uMessage, wParam, lParam);
}

For those of you interested, the MSDN documentation on the TaskbarCreated registered message is hidden away here.