Windows 7 programming: Taskbar. Part 6 – AppId.

Recently I wrote how it is possible to display tabs for child windows of our application. In this case we needed to display child windows of our application. For these purposes we used CustomWindowManager class.

The same effect can achieve, if we start some copies of same our application. In this case Windows 7 will define that this same application and will group windows in one icon.

Let's try understand how it works. Basis is concept Application ID. For each window we can set the ID. This feature also can be used when it is necessary to avoid such behaviour. In this case it is necessary to set various AppId for each such window. To make it it is possible using. For this purpose it is necessary to invoke SetAppId method.

private void SetAppIdButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

    WindowsFormsExtensions.SetAppId(this, “SomeAppId”);

}

Thus, we can set various AppId for each window and they will not be grouped.

However, similarly also probably to group some windows from different applications. For this purpose it is necessary to set identical AppId for each of windows. In this case the task panel of Windows 7 will group these applications in one icon. For example, in this case I have set identical AppId for different windows from different applications and these windows have appeared grouped in the task panel of Windows 7.

Sample application: