Determine Horizontal or Vertical Position of Taskbar

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Question:

I have developed a screen combining boxes and a dialog box. Looks very nice. Trouble is, if the taskbar is moved around, top left for right, the alignment is off between the box and dialog box.

Does anyone know how to determine the postion of the taskbar. I have searched high and low, used a registry monitor program, nothing.

Answer:

I think the taskbar position is saved in the ShellIconCache file in the windows directory. But it is a binary file and I have no idea on how to read it.

In cases like this I usually just make a smaller screen so that the taskbar could be anywhere and my screen is still visible.

Here's another idea:

        WinMetrics(0 ) = 1024 Width of screen in pixels
        WinMetrics(1 ) = 768 Height of screen in pixels

With the task bar at the top/bottom:

        WinMetrics(16) = 1024 Width of full screen window
        WinMetrics(17) = 715 Height of full screen window

With the task bar at the side:

        WinMetrics(16) = 964 Width of full screen window
        WinMetrics(17) = 746 Height of full screen window

So with WIL's functions you can at least tell whether the task bar is oriented horizontally or vertically.

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Article ID:   W13148

Filename:   Determine Taskbar Location.txt