BRH.numbera.com

While I was updating my PopupNotify control today, I realized that I had created another useful little control for XBList that I hadn’t released, the WebLinkLabel Control. This simple control wraps the standard LinkLabel control to make it easier to embed multiple hyperlinks in a label, each of which will load up a URL in the user’s default browser when clicked. It’s not the most complex thing in the world, but it has proven useful for inserting help links into XBList’s error dialogs, so I suspect it might be of some utility to others. Using it is about as simple as using a standard Label. Just drag the WebLinkLabel onto your form, customize it however you like, then assign a specially-formatted string to the Text property. You use “url” tags to specify where you want links, like this: “Hello, this is text <url=http://brh.numbera.com>with a link in it</url>.” You can of course have as many links, pointing to as many different URLs, as you would like. If you want to get that formatted string back out, use the LinkText property, or if you want to get a flattened view out (”Hello, this is text with a link in it.”), use the Text property.

This code is licensed under the LGPL, like the other XBList bits I’ve released. As usual, I would appreciate it if whoever uses this code would email me to let me know how they’re using it, just for my own amusement. You can download the control right here.

A couple years back I posted the source of XBList’s tray notification control on my site as the PopupNotify control. I licensed it under the LGPL so people could use it for their own applications. While I requested that whoever used it should let me know, I’ve never received any email about it until this week, when somebody wrote to tell me that they had been using it but it didn’t work on Vista, and they wanted some help getting it to work. Despite the fact that I would rather they had told me about this beforehand, I’ve taken this as an opportunity to update the component. I just pulled out the current version of the control that I’m using for XBList, which has a much prettier Vista-style look, less P/Invoke calls, and other .NET 2.0 improvements. I’ve left the 1.1 version of the control around for anyone who wants to use it but hasn’t updated to .NET 2.0 yet.

Hopefully this component will continue to be useful to other developers, and they’ll let me know if they’re using it in their projects, since it’s just so much more fun to release stuff for free when you get to see it in action.

One of the first things I noticed in Windows Vista were the toolbars. Certainly they’re prettier now, and the fact that the main menu is on the way out is exciting. But the most interesting thing is that they’re different colors. Windows Explorer gets a blue-green toolbar, Windows Mail and Windows Calendar are blue, Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Gallery are black, and Internet Explorer gets a silver variant. This seems like a cool way to divide up the built-in apps, but the question that comes immediately to my mind is what color a third-party app should choose. It turns out that the Vista User Experience Guidelines are silent on this issue.

Fortunately everettm over at the Shell:Revealed blog was able to answer this question in the comments. To summarize, the recommendation is that all third-party apps use the silver toolbars. The colors are reserved for Windows branding, with blue-green standing for core Windows components like the shell, black for media apps, and blue for PIM/organization apps.

While I appreciate the response, I’m not sure I like that answer. I really like the colored toolbars, and I’d love to have my apps integrate more with the general look and feel of Vista by picking the toolbar color that is most appropriate to my application. For example, if I went to a toolbar-only UI for PNGGauntlet, I might consider going with the black toolbar, since it is an image manipulation app. Hopefully by that time the UX Guidelines will have been updated to give more explicit (and more permissive) guidance on toolbar colors.