WebBand ExplorerBar   

Have your very own customized Internet Explorer ExplorerBar for Internet Explorer.  An ExplorerBar is like the Search and Favorites sidebars, which open from the left when its toolbar button is clicked.  It can be used for things like corporate intranets or for your own product to run in Internet Explorer.  Consider the IeToolbox ExplorerBar product in the screenshot below:

IeToolbox is a great example of what you can do in an ExplorerBar product.  IeToolbox does many things, using tabs to access the different modules.  It is a Passwords and Notes Keeper, Webform Filler, File Viewer and Favorites Searcher.  It is also extendable, so anyone can create their own Addin.  The screenshot shows a Calendar and Daily Devotional Addins.

What we offer
Rather than doing a bunch of low-level C++ programming to create your own ExplorerBar, wouldn't it be great if you could have your own custom ExplorerBar running in minutes?  We offer to create a custom ExplorerBar for you that hosts the Microsoft Webbrowser component.  You can have it load your own local webpage, intranet webpage or Internet webpage.  The webpage can have anything a normal webpage can have, including Flash, ActiveX, .NET WinForms and DHTML effects.  Furthermore, you can use our HTML Scripting Pages (HSP) product to run custom ASP pages from your own HSP file.  In short, you can pretty much do anything in your ExplorerBar.

What you get
We will provide you with a customized ExplorerBar DLL ready for you to create your own content, compiled with the following features:

• Your own custom toolbar icon.

• Your own CLSIDs so as not to conflict with other customized ExplorerBars.

• Set to open your specified webpage (from your PC, intranet or Internet).

Features
To be of any real use, your ExplorerBar needs to be able to manipulate the main IE browser.  You do this with JavaScript on your ExplorerBar webpage via the window.external mechanism.  The Microsoft Webbrowser control provides a way to set the external object to any COM object.  We set the external object to be the COM interface (IWebBrowser2) of the main browser window.  So to cause the main browser to navigate, you just use this code in your Javascript:

window.external.Navigate("www.mysite.com")

To make a hyperlink trigger navigation, use the OnClick event of the HTML element.  For example:

<a href="#" onClick="window.external.Navigate("www.mysite.com")

Its that easy.  Furthermore, we can set the external object to your own custom COM object if you want, and we can forward any event from either webbrowser window to your COM object.  For example, we can forward the OnNavigateComplete event so you can have full knowledge of every navigation the user makes.  Or you can put any number of custom methods on your COM object that you can call from Javascript for whatever purpose you need.  For example, if your COM interface has the method myMethod, then you would call it from Javascript like this:

window.external.myMethod

Download the sample and try it, and contact us if you have any questions.