Background
In one of the newsgroups, a guy asked about how to show the Taskbar and Start Menu properties dialog in VC++. I am going to show here the ways in which several different Control Panel applets can be run from VC++.
Running from Run box
Running an applet from the "Run" box is easy' just type "control desk.cpl" and press OK. It will show you the Desktop properties dialog box.
Running from VC++
Running an applet from your code is also easy:
ShellExecute( this->m_hWnd, NULL, "desk.cpl", NULL, NULL, 0);
Then what is the problem
The problem with showing the "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties" applet is this that you can't find a "cpl" file which shows this dialog.
Solution
For help, I searched MSDN which says "you can show this dialog with any scripting language". But what about VC++? Here is how to show this dialog the IDispatch way.
CString ss = ("TrayProperties");
BSTR szMember = ss.AllocSysString();
DISPID dispid;
COleDispatchDriver disp;
disp.CreateDispatch("Shell.Application");
disp.m_lpDispatch->GetIDsOfNames(IID_NULL,&szMember,1,LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT,&dispid);
disp.InvokeHelper(dispid, DISPATCH_METHOD, NULL,NULL,NULL);
SysFreeString( szMember);
Never forget to initialize and uninitialize COM.
