Information Bar

The Windows Explorer can display notification banners under certain conditions. They are displayed in the upper area of the shell view, like this for example in the case of a failing network:

As you can see in this screenshot, a banner can also contain a menu the end-user can open and use.

ShellBoost version 1.2.2.0 offers exclusive support for this feature.

To display such a banner, you must override methods of the ShellFolder class. This is demonstrated in the Registry Folder sample.

So, if you just want to display a message, override the GetInformationBar method, like this, for example:

// this is called by ShellBoost
protected override InformationBar GetInformationBar()
{
    // in this sample, we test the user has enough rights
    if (Hive != RegistryHive.LocalMachine || DiagnosticsInformation.GetTokenElevationType() == TokenElevationType.Full)
        return null;
 
    var bar = new InformationBar();
    // the guid identifies the banner, it must not be the empty guid.
    // Use the same guid for one given banner.
    bar.Guid = _adminMessageGuid;
    // set the message that will be displayed to the end-user.
    // it must not be null nor empty not whitespaces only
    bar.Message = "You must be running with full priviledges to change anything here";
    return bar;
}

This is what’s displayed when the Shell Folder is open:

In this screenshot, we also added a menu (this is optional) like this:

protected override void CreateInformationBarMenu(InformationBar bar, ShellMenu appendMenu)
{
    var item = new ShellMenuItem(appendMenu, "What is my UAC level?");
    appendMenu.Items.Add(item);
}

And the menu handling is done like this:

protected override async void HandleInformationBarMenu(InformationBar bar, IntPtr hwndOwner, int id)
{
    if (id == 1) // first item has id 1, etc.
    {
        await WindowsUtilities.DoModelessAsync(() =>
        {
            System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(new Win32Window(hwndOwner), "UAC level is " + DiagnosticsInformation.GetTokenElevationType(), "Registry Folder");
        });
        return;
    }
}

Each menu item added to the banner menu is automatically given an id that correspond to it’s insertion index.

The result is shown here:

Note the MessageBox here is a modeless Window for your app (the ShellBoost Shell Folder server) but a modal one for the Explorer Window.