Everybody’s excited about Windows 7 and there might be a few of you guys out there wanting to take advantage of some of the new features of the OS in your applications. In this post, I’ll show you how you can quickly add Jumplist support to your existing application (Yes, even WinForms applications)

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Everybody’s excited about Windows 7 and there might be a few of you guys out there wanting to take advantage of some of the new features of the OS in your applications. In this post, I’ll show you how you can quickly add Jumplist support to your existing application (Yes, even WinForms applications)

In order to keep things simple, let’s just make the assumption that this existing application of mine has 3 very useful screens: Default, Green Mode and Red Mode ( I’m a developer, I’m not very creative )

Because I want to save my user some additional clicks to get into green / red mode, I can take advantage of a new feature of Windows 7 called Jumplists: when a user right-clicks on my app’s icon on the Windows 7 task bar, this menu pops up and gives him access to tasks that we expect him to frequent. There are a lot of tutorials out there that teach how to add Recent/Frequent documents to this list. The samples included in the library we’ll be using will show you how.

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For this example, we’ll learn how to use our applications existing custom functions (and icons) with Windows 7 jumplists but first, download the Windows 7 Taskbar Developer Resource

For this example, I have a very simple Hello Windows 7 application. In the application, I have a menu bar that loads up additional screens. In this case, it’s just the same screen and switching the colors, but it could easily be a function that will load up another UserControl with different functions. Productivity is key, so I’d like to allow my user to go straight to these screens on startup.

In order to enable this, I’ve made a method that will allow the application to switch between user screens based on command line arguments when launching the application.

private void ProcessArguments()
{
    string[] args = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs();

    if (args.Length > 1)
    {
        if (args[1].Equals("/r"))
        {
            LoadRedScreen();
        }
        else if (args[1].Equals("/g"))
        {
            LoadGreenScreen();
        }

    }
}

In this piece of code, I’m basically checking that IF there are arguments passed when running the application, I’ll be calling a method to load the appropriate UserControl (We’ve already seen that this is the same method invoked by the menu item in our Menubar).

Now we start using the libraries provided for us to make it easier to integrate with the Windows 7 Taskbar. But first let’s import the namespace of the library, plus some additional ones we will be using along the way

using Windows7.DesktopIntegration;
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection;

Next we add the following properties to the form:

string appID = "Hello Windows 7";
JumpListManager jlm;
    

The key thing here is the JumpListManager but if you want more information on the appID and all the goodness it brings, visit http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/06/18/developing-for-the-windows-7-taskbar-application-id.aspx. The next thing I have to do is override

protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)
{
    base.WndProc(ref m);
}

Before we start jumping into adding jumplists, we want to remember that since this is an existing application meant to be run in existing versions of Windows, we’d like to make sure that we’ll only execute the additional code IF the application is running in Windows 7, otherwise, operate as usual. To do this, we check whether the OS version is 6.1 or greater (RC builds still register Major version as 6) with this code:

OperatingSystem os = Environment.OSVersion;
if ((os.Version.Major == 6 && os.Version.Minor >= 1) || os.Version.Major > 6)
{
    //some code
}

Now for the fun part. The OS message that we want to lookout for is the message that tells us that the taskbar button has been created. Then we can start adding the Jumplist items to the button.

if (m.Msg == Windows7Taskbar.TaskbarButtonCreatedMessage)
{
    try
    {

        jlm = new JumpListManager(appID);
        jlm.UserRemovedItems += delegate { };

        string strAppDir = Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().Location);
        string app = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().GetName().Name + ".exe";

        jlm.AddUserTask(new ShellLink
        {
            Title = "Color it Red!",
            Path = Path.Combine(strAppDir, app),
            Arguments = "/r",
            IconLocation = Path.Combine(strAppDir, @"ico\Red.ico")

        });

        jlm.AddUserTask(new ShellLink
        {
            Title = "Color it Green!",
            Path = Path.Combine(strAppDir, app),
            Arguments = "/g",
            IconLocation = Path.Combine(strAppDir, @"ico\green.ico")
        });
        jlm.Refresh();

        ProcessArguments();
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {

    }

Let’s break this down.

We start by creating a new instance of the JumpListManager passing the appID we’ve assigned to our app. Next we register to the UserRemovedItems event as this is required if we want to refresh the JumpList after adding items to it. In this case, we do nothing when any items are removed.

Here, we get the directory where the application is running as well as the app name itself, so we can tell the JumpList link what to invoke when it is clicked. Basically it’s emulating running your app from a command prompt and passing the arguments (if any). Now we can proceed to adding our JumpList items.

I’ve mentioned we can add a few other things such as Recent Documents & Frequent Documents  but you’ll find lots of resources on this on the net as well as the samples for the library. In this case, we’re adding a new User Task to the jumplist which results in having these links under a “Tasks” header as below:

Path, Arguments, and IconLocation are pretty self explanatory.

I need to make sure my icons are available to my application so here I’ve placed all my custom icons in one directory and set the property so the IDE knows to copy these files to the output directory.

After defining my JumpList links, I can call a Refresh on the JumpListManager so it loads up all my new links. After this, I make a call to my ProcessArguments method. This will make sure it runs the additional code if any arguments were passed when running the application. Of course, if you see that your users may want to run your app from a command line and pass arguments manually, you might want to put this call outside of the if statement or anywhere before your first form completes loading.

It’s that easy! If you got lost on the way, here’s the source to this project. If you manage to get your JumpLists going, feel free post a link to your app!

RESOURCES:

Windows 7 RC Training Kit for Developers

Managed APIs in this sample 

• Windows 7 Taskbar – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Windows7Taskbar

Other Managed APIs available:

• Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack
• Windows 7 Taskbar Extensions – http://windows7taskbarext.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=22682

I missed the release of the latest version of the Facebook Developer Toolkit from clarity consulting so I decided to play around with it after our Mix It Up event.

There have been much changes to the toolkit since the last time I looked into it. It took me a few minutes to try [...]]]>

I missed the release of the latest version of the Facebook Developer Toolkit from clarity consulting so I decided to play around with it after our Mix It Up event.

There have been much changes to the toolkit since the last time I looked into it. It took me a few minutes to try to figure out how to get a simple application out. The documentation posted here is a bit outdated so let me post my own little how-to. They’ve actually made it a lot easier but the new API needs a bit of getting used to I guess. It’s a bit confusing as the APIs for CanvasFBMLBasePage is different from CanvasIFrameBasePage. I hope they standardize soon though. Considering that this is supposedly an RC, it doesn’t seem like they’ve settled on a convention yet.

So again, assumption is:

1. You’re using C# as your language

2. You’re building an app with the CanvasFBMLBasePage (haven’t tried out the Master Page yet.. baby steps my friend)

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/developers and Setup A New Application. Expand the optional fields and set up your application, making sure you have the following details filled in:

2. Once you have successfully set this up, take note of your API Key and Secret:

3. Fire up Visual Studio 2008 and set up a new ASP.NET Web Application

4. Open up Default.aspx and remove everything but the first line (which is the page directive that says tells .NET which is the CodeFile. Your default.aspx should look something like this:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<asp:label ID="Content" runat="server" text="Label"></asp:label>

// For convenience, I added an asp.net label control where I would write out the FBML later on. If you’d rather use Response.Write() you could do that as well. Then you wouldn’t need to have the second line on Default.aspx

5. Before we dig into the CS files, we’ll need to add a reference to the facebook dlls that we can download from codeplex. Simply select to download bin.zip and it should give you the dlls necessary for you to build a Facebook app. Unzip this in a location you can easily find. Go to your Solution Explorer and right-click on your project –> Add Reference

Click on the Browse tab and navigate to where you extracted the binaries for the toolkit. You will want to add a reference to both facebook.dll and facebook.web.dll //yes, the non-caps irks me too.. wait till you see the classes *sigh*

When you finish adding these two necessaries, it’ll pull some other files along for the ride as well so don’t be surprised about that.

6. Now that’s finished, we can open up our .CS file and start by importing the necessary namespaces namely:

using facebook;
using facebook.web;

and then, make our class inherit from the CanvasFBMLBasePage class that is part of the toolkit. This base class should take care of all the nitty gritties of dealing with Facebook and making sure it knows who you are (or in this case, your application)

public partial class _Default : CanvasFBMLBasePage
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }
}

7. Before we proceed, lets add a snippet to our web.config file to set our APIKEY and secret. The base class will be looking at our web.config file for the values to use to authenticate with Facebook. All you need to do is find this section:

and replace it with something like:

<appSettings>
  <add key="APIKey" value ="8e38f5fc72b989b8146dc91ece7e9b6a"/>
  <add key="Secret" value ="d9a5bd957d3aa1c69316839f1543fce0"/>
</appSettings>

of course put in the APIKey and Secret that was provided to you by Facebook. Don’t go using my key, it won’t work with your URL anyway Make sure you SAVE!

8. Going back to Default.aspx.cs, we can now proceed to add logic to our application.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    base.Page_Init(sender, e); // this is the code that will call the base

                               // methods that deal with authenticating 

                               // with facebook and all that mumbo jumbo

if(!IsPostBack)    {
    stringuid = base.API.uid.ToString(); // this is the code to retrieve

                                          // the userid of the logged in user 

                                          //(the person accessing your application

   Content.Text = "<fb:profile-pic uid='" + uid + "'/>";               // You can also do something 

   Content.Text+= "hello, <fb:name uid='"+ uid + "' useyou='false'/>"; // like Response.Write( 

                                                                       // "<fb:profile-pic uid='" +

                                                                       // uid + "'/>"); for this part

   Content.Text += " you have "+ base.API.friends.get().Count + " friends so far "; 

   //anything you need to know about your user, you will find from base.API – all your base are belong to us

}}

9. Once that’s done, we can now go and publish our application by right-clicking on the project in solution explore and selecting publish

Make sure you are publishing to the Callback URL you specified when you applied for the Application Key and Secret.

10. When you’re done publishing and you try to access the application, you should see something like this:

and when you click allow, you’ll get:

Some issues I noticed though is that when I try to access the application URL when I am logged out, Facebook tells me that the page cannot be found. But when I access it when I’m already logged in, it’ll prompt me to allow the application to access my information if i have not yet added the app. I’m checking with the forum on codeplex to see whether this is a Facebook issue or whether it’s the Tool’kit’s

Congratulations! You have now built your first FBML based Facebook application! Will let you know how far I go with this new framework.

It seems to be cleaner code right now, but I guess I’ll need to fool around with this to find out more.

Hope this helps!