The disappointment of people who need to have their hand held from beginning to end

Raymond Chen

Some customers already have the answer but need to have their hand held.

My customer wants to enforce a company-wide policy of disabling the “Keep the taskbar on top of other windows” feature. We have confirmed that there is no group policy setting for controlling this setting. Further research reveals the SHAppBarMessage function. The customer wants to know if there is any way he can write code that will use this function to modify the setting.

The customer found a map to a stream, saw that there were directions printed on it, and then asked, “Is there any way I can follow these directions and get some water?” The product team dutifully wrote up the four-line function to do the work the customer requested—call SHAppBarMessage with ABM_GETSTATE to get the current state, turn off the ABM_ALWAYSONTOP flag, and then call it again with ABM_SETSTATE to apply the changes—but it still frustrates me that we had to deal with this question in the first place. It’s one thing to say, “I tried doing X and it didn’t work. Here’s the code I was using.” It’s another thing to say, “I discovered function X. Can you write code for me?”

No lesson today. Just venting.

Raymond Chen

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