The Task Pane

If any of you have used Office XP or higher then in most of the applications there is now this thing called a Task Pane. Its function is to complement the menu options by making things easier to find but in a more task/process oriented way. I like it and more importantly a lot of the less tech-savy computer people I know find it very useful. This has lead me to wonder why there is no control or simple implementation of this that we can use in our applications. If you have seen anything like that please let me know. It doesn't seem to hard and currently I have been bouncing around ideas for implementing it. So I figured I'd open it up for discussion any ideas?

Some of the plans I have tried or started on are: First I just owner draw a listbox to give the same look but I had some trouble with mouse over effects. I still haven't shelved this idea but am exploring others. I also thought of simplifying things by using attributes, although this was more for a specific project. I had a WorkerProcessManager class which acted as the control, actually it just dynamically loaded linklabels into a panel and managed them (I'm lazy). I would then create classes derived from the WorkerProcessBase (Attribute) class ro do various things. Next I would link the derived WorkerProcessBase classes to different classes used in the application by adding the ProcessAttributes it needed to it. Then all I did was pass the main object to the manager and it would handle loading the links and processes from the attributes. This worked ok especially since it was in an MDI platform where there was classes used as 'documents' so to speak, although I don't know that it would be ideal for other situations. Anyway I figured I'd throw the idea out there for any suggestions.

Haven't seen the task Pane control yet, as my company likes to try and keep us in the dark ages. I just got Office 2003 today, so I will most likely load it after work and will take a look at it. Sounds pretty cool though...

Umm , isn't something close to this one here : http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscct...lePanelBar.asp but without expand/collapse buttons and checkboxes?

No that is actually not what I mean. Also its not so much the control but the idea or functionality. Its like a quick list of the most common things a user would do and possibly any walkthru type things to help them. Its not needed but can be very handy especially for non technically people. I'll post a screen in a minute.

I see . It's really cool . The implementation won't be big much different than a panel with some more features (at least I think so) . You can start from Codeproject . They really have good stuff there . Good luck .

Here is what you want (I hope). Complete set of classes written in C# about task panel plus some more niffty controls. Hope it's not too late anyways .:D
http://windowsforms.net/articles/usi...rcontrols.aspx