Windows Live Toolbar

Want to be able to personalize your browser to give you one click access to your favorite webpages? One of the best ways to customize and personalize Windows Live Toolbar is to create custom buttons. Custom buttons allow you to create shortcuts to a website, to search a website directly from the Toolbar searchbox and to display information in the button’s menu or in a HTML window. These customizations let you personalize the toolbar and are really easy to make. You can make a custom button to show the weather in your city, to play a game inline in the browser or anything else that you can imagine. Some examples of custom buttons are the MSN, Gallery and News buttons that are installed by default with the Toolbar. The MSN button, for example is the button with the butterfly icon that contains a shortcut to the MSN homepage and has links to various content on MSN.

To create your first button, you can use the Windows Live Gallery custom button creation page located here

http://gallery.live.com/createcustombutton.aspx

It steps the user through some easy steps to create a basic custom button that can have RSS feeds, shortcuts, searches and a menu of links. When you create the button, you will then have the option to add the button to your toolbar, download the button package and/ or share the button with others in the Windows Live Gallery. I recommend that you first add the button to your toolbar to see what you have created.

Custom buttons are defined by an XML file with one or more icon files. Your custom button will appear on the rightmost of the Toolbar. To see the XML used to generate the button, you can look in the following directory on your computer

C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Application Data\Microsoft\WLTB Custom Buttons 

You will find a folder for each of your custom buttons, for example the folder “microsoft.msn.mymsn.btn” contains the XML file and image for the MSN button. You can also view the folder containing your button and look at the XML file for the button. Using the Windows Live Toolbar Custom Button SDK located below you can learn how to create more advanced buttons.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa738787.aspx

With the SDK, you can learn how to edit the XML file associated with your button to change its behavior. One of my favorite features is the ability to add a “buttonWindow” which will allow you to  create a dropdown of any webpage in the window. This can be especially helpful to get a quick glance of a website that you browse often without navigating in your current page. There are a lot of other cool features that are supported by custom buttons, check out the SDK for more information.

- Shannon Westphal, Windows Live Toolbar Program Manager