Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
The taskbar is arguably central to the look and feel of Windows. As a window, it exists within a process, typically though surely not necessarily, the Windows Explorer (EXPLORER.EXE). SHELL32 provides functions through which the taskbar in its one process becomes accessible in a standardised way to any other process, as long as this other process loads SHELL32 and can call these functions.
The following functions all come to SHELL32 from the one object file (SHLNOT.OBJ). All but two date from the days of Win32s and Windows NT 3.51, though only then as placeholders, with implementations that fail trivially. These ancient functions had non-trivial implementations by version 4.00, however, when they were joined by another.