Yousef’s blog

IE7 Advanced toolbar buttons

Currently, there are several ways to create addons for Internet Explorer. The two I’ll be talking about in this post are BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and Toolbar Buttons. To create a toolbar button, you simply add a value into the registry specifying whether you want to either launch a script, a function inside a COM library, executable or open an Explorer Toolband. When writing an advanced addon, most of the time you’d probably want to use a COM object.

As described in the Toolbar Button MSDN article, it’s fairly easy to get the COM object’s IOleCommandTarget::Exec function called when the user clicks the toolbar button. However, this method limits you to basic toolbar buttons. What if you’d like to create more advanced toolbar buttons, one with a dropdown menu for example?

This is a problem I ran into during the development of the first version of the Mapper IE7  addon. I’ve also seen this question being asked a few times at the IE Extension Development MSDN Forums. Several solutions to the problem are available on the internet (like this Codeproject article, or this newsgroup discussion). However, none of the solutions I found adds a real dropdown button into the toolbar, what I actually wanted to do. Continue reading IE7 Advanced toolbar buttons…

Tags: addons, BHO, COM, dropdown, IE7, internet explorer, mapper

Designertopia

On the first day of February I left at about 5 AM to Rotterdam Airport to catch my flight to London. I visited the Designertopia conference held February 1st/2nd this year. Even though the conference was mainly targeted at designers (and being mostly a developer myself) the sessions were pretty interesting. Continue reading Designertopia…

Tags: conference, designertopia, expresion, microsoft, vista, webdesign, webdevelopment