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.