Writing Managed Control Panel Items for Vista

The Moth - Writing managed control panel items

"In the past, if you had to develop control panel items you would start thinking about .cpl files. With Windows Vista, there seems to be a tendency to take advantage of the new ability to create them in separate executables! Those of you that know me long enough can see where I am going with this... it means that we can develop these in managed code now :-)

I will assume that you have a scenario for actually integrating with the control panel and I will just share the mechanics. Create your managed Windows Forms application and give it whatever UI you want. You actually don’t have to do anything special in the project. In fact, you could even reuse your existing main application and just use a command line option for when it gets launched from the control panel.

So once you have the exe, how do you integrate it with the control panel? The answer is by adding some registry entries. ..."

Daniel makes it look easy to create/add managed control panel apps/items/applets/etc to Vista.