A modern resurrection of the Windows <=10 Deskbands, written in WinUI 3 with WASDK.

This works by creating a transparent always-on-top WinUI3 window, and parenting it to the taskbar. Then we add a clip region to the window to match the content's size, so it doesn't interfere with other taskbar interactions.

It's literally just a window on top of the taskbar.

I've given it a tray icon too, so you can close it.

For fun, I've added a JSON-based extension system, so you can create your own deskband without needing to recompile. To do this, you need to add an AppExtension to your appxmanifest, and point it to a JSON file that describes your deskband.

Add an extension like this to your appxmanifest, inside the <Application> tag:

<Extensions>
  <uap3:Extension Category="windows.appExtension"> 
    <uap3:AppExtension 
        Name="com.zadjii.deskband" 
        DisplayName="{{Some friendly name for your deskband}}" 
        Id="give-me-a-unique-id" 
        PublicFolder="Public"> 
      <uap3:Properties> 
        <DeskbandProvider>
          <Registration>path/to/your.json</Registration> <!-- path relative to the PublicFolder above -->
        </DeskbandProvider>
      </uap3:Properties> 
    </uap3:AppExtension> 
  </uap3:Extension>
</Extensions>

The JSON file you point to should look something like this:

{
    "providerId": "com.zadjii.deskbandJson",
    "deskbands": 
    [
        {
            "id": "another_unique_id",
            "icon": "..\\Assets\\Deskband.png",
            "title": "Test Deskband",
            "subtitle": "I came from JSON",
            "buttons": 
            [
                {
                    "id": "btn-001",
                    "icon": "\uE701",
                    "name": "Bing",
                    "invokeUri": "https://www.bing.com"
                },
                {
                    "id": "btn-002",
                    "icon": "https://github.com/favicon.ico",
                    "name": "Button 2 Tooltip",
                    "invokeUri": "https://www.github.com"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Icons can be anything that Command Palette supports - font icons, local images, or web images. Relative paths will be evaluated relative to the public folder you set in the appxmanifest.

invokeUri can be any URI that Windows can open. You can make these URI's back into your app, and handle them there, if you want to do something more complex.

These files don't hot-reload yet. PR's welcome 😄

Inspired by the Command Palette APIs, there's a simple TaskbarItemViewModel you can extend to create your own deskband. Stick those into the Bands object in BandsItemsControl, and we'll display that set of deskbands.

Currently it shows three deskbands:

• A test with buttons
• A hello world label
• the Media Controls deskband, as a recreation of the old AudioBand

If we wouldn't just totally conflict with windows in the taskbar, I'd add that straight to the cmdpal API. EDIT: These no longer conflict with the taskbar items.

These ITaskbarItems are created from the JSON extensions above.

If you want to put whatever into the taskbar, you can yank out the BandsItemsControl and stick whatever you want into MainContent in MainWindow.xaml. The MainContent control is what we'll use to clip, so make sure all your content is inside that.

<ContentControl x:Name="MainContent">
    <BandsItemsControl />
    <!-- Replace this ^ with your own content -->
</ContentControl>

You'll need the Windows App SDK installed, and a recent Visual Studio 2022 with the WinUI workload. Then just build and run. You should see a new window appear on the taskbar.