ITrayDeskBand support in StartAllBack

[Tim De Baets]

Hi, although StartAllBack brings back deskband support in Windows 11, I've noticed that it doesn't implement the ITrayDeskBand COM interface yet - when I call any of the interface's methods from a test program they currently all return 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE). This is with the latest available version of StartAllBack, 3.9.11.

Would it be possible to implement this interface in one of the upcoming versions of StartAllBack?

This would allow other software to again use the ITrayDeskBand interface to programmatically enable/disable their deskband or check its state. For example, the Windows Media Player Plus! plug-in brings back the Miniplayer deskband from older versions of WMP and allows users to enable/disable the deskband from within the plug-in's settings, by using ITrayDeskBand.

Thanks!

[Tihiy]

Toolbars must die, sorry.

[Tim De Baets]

I don't see why it would be so hard to implement ITrayDeskBand in StartAllBack. I've just tried ExplorerPatcher and with that, the interface works as expected, the behavior is exactly the same as in the versions of Windows that still had built-in support for deskbands. Why can't StartAllBack provide the same functionality?

[Tihiy]

It sure could, it's not that hard. It is a choice to make experience with toolbars worse.

[Tim De Baets]

I don't really understand your aversion for desk bands. A simple web search brings up lots of posts of people asking how they can bring back desk band support on Windows 11. StartAllBack is a perfect solution for this, except for the missing ITrayDeskBand implementation.

If you could nevertheless still implement the interface, I would happily donate some money to the project. If the source code would be available, I would probably even implement it myself.