{"id":19303,"date":"2009-02-02T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/02\/02\/how-do-i-programmatically-show-and-hide-the-quick-launch-bar\/"},"modified":"2009-02-02T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T10:00:00","slug":"how-do-i-programmatically-show-and-hide-the-quick-launch-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090202-00\/?p=19303","title":{"rendered":"How do I programmatically show and hide the Quick Launch bar?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Mihai wants to know <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/pages\/407234.aspx#537717\"> how to show or hide the Quick Launch bar programmatically<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> That&#8217;s not something a program should be doing. Whether the Quick Launch bar is shown or hidden is an end user setting, and programs should not be overriding the user&#8217;s preferences. Explorer consciously does not expose an interface for showing and hiding taskbar bands because it would just be a target for abuse. Much like the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2007\/03\/20\/1915586.aspx\"> program that wants to uninstall other programs<\/a>, the taskbar would become a battleground among programs that each wanted to force themselves on and force their opponents off. <\/p>\n<p> The user is the arbiter of what goes into the Taskbar. <\/p>\n<p> I&#8217;m told that Windows Vista added a new <code>ITrayDeskBand<\/code> interface that does indeed let you turn taskbar bands on and off. (I don&#8217;t know whether it works for Quick Launch. Heck, I don&#8217;t even know if it works at all! <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2008\/11\/18\/9114716.aspx\"> Not my area of expertise<\/a>.) The story I heard was that so many programs were doing exactly what they shouldn&#8217;t be doing&mdash;namely forcing their feature on, overriding the user&#8217;s preference&mdash;that the Taskbar folks decided, &#8220;If you can&#8217;t stop people from doing a bad thing, at least make them do the bad thing under your supervision. That way you have just one evil thing to support instead of everybody&#8217;s home-grown undocumented hack.&#8221; It&#8217;s sort of the Taskbar Needle Exchange Program. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Mihai wants to know how to show or hide the Quick Launch bar programmatically. That&#8217;s not something a program should be doing. Whether the Quick Launch bar is shown or hidden is an end user setting, and programs should not be overriding the user&#8217;s preferences. Explorer consciously does not expose an interface for showing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-19303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Commenter Mihai wants to know how to show or hide the Quick Launch bar programmatically. That&#8217;s not something a program should be doing. Whether the Quick Launch bar is shown or hidden is an end user setting, and programs should not be overriding the user&#8217;s preferences. Explorer consciously does not expose an interface for showing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}