QUOTE(Vyoma @ Jul 14 2007, 06:41 AM)
I need to develop a toolbar for Internet Explorer. Nothing radical. There will be a text box and a button on the toolbar. Whatever is filled in the tool bar needs to be processed and a URL is constructed and page is redirected to that URL when the button is pressed.
I tried to get some info on this my lurking over at the MSDN forums but all I got is headache.
Any one have any clue where I should start looking at a definitive guide for this? I did try searching for this, but nothing relevant came up.
I've done something quite similar few years back. My company need to develop an IE toolbar to translate international domain name. We have 2 choice of programming language, .net or C++. We ended up with C++, cause it's harder to convince users to download a huge 28MB framework just to enable a toolbar. With C++ it's a bit tough to start off. Lucky we found a good tutorial and sample to start with
http://www.codeproject.com/atl/ietoolbartutorial.asp. It's by Erik Thompson, posted on CodeProject. Along in the same article, there's a few more related tutorial linked.
It serve as a good start for us to write that toolbar. We even have a Chinese Input (pinyin) written into the toolbar. C++ is good for this as it's not dependent on bulky library, and we only use ATL, which comes with Win2K and above. We were using VC6 at that time. Later migrated to VC7 for better code compatibility and stability. It was a pain to migrate as well, but it's worth it. After you get hold of the basic toolbar, the rest is just a matter of programming. The toughest part is only to get the toolbar display in the IE. This is mostly due to CSID and COM involvement, which we're not that expert in. A small mistake in the coding, be it the loading sequence or specific GUID, the toolbar just disappear, with no clue on what's wrong. It takes a lot of troubleshooting skill to get it right.
If you toolbar is for in house use, or own use, you can consider .net, it's a lot easier.
Good Luck
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