Hi,

Sorry this tool me longer to finalise - I did say that I hoped to get it up and running by last weekend - however after playing around with the UI I ended making evreything configurable and so the UI got a little out of hand - but anyway apologies over here is the To Do List Plugin.

Download the DSPACKAGE file (at the bottom) and with DS RUNNING doube click on the file (where ever you saved it).

The Plugin should install with no issues - you might be asked if you want it installed for everyone or just for yourself - depends on your network settings and OS I think.

To start with the Plugin will have no items and thus will tell you so - however now is a good time to discuss the Toolbar the items are as follows from left to right

1.) Show All Items - displays all possible items - which are enabled
2.) Show Urgent Items - displays all urgent items which are enabled
3.) Show Medium Priority Items
4.) Show Low priority Items
5.) Show all Note Style Items
6.) Show All Date / Time Items
7.) Show All Countdown Items
8.) Show Properties

Ok So how do you enter Items - 2 ways
1.) Right click and select 'Add new Item' from Menu
Dialog should be fairly self explanatory - However there are Three things to
be aware of
a.) There are three different Priorities - Urgent, Medium and Low - the difference between them is the colour that will be shown. The colours of each priority type is configurable on the properties dialog - you can change the two colours that make up the gradient background, the colour of the text and the colour of the time if it is being displayed for each Priority type
b.) There are three types of items, Note - just a simple note, Date Time which will display a time and or date as well as the name of the task - this can be a time and date of when the note was created or something in the future - it is more for prompting than anything else and finally the big one which is a timed event item.- See below
c.) You will see on the control at the bottom of the screen exactly how the Item will look in the panel before you leave the page

2.) Go to properties and add it on the front page. You can also edit an existing one from here and you can delete items from here too.
You can Enable or Disable items by clicking on them in the list view control.

Whilst we are on the properties dialog - the General tab will allow you to set global preferences, the colour tab as indicated before will let you change the colours of the priority types.

Ok So what about these timed events then. Ok these events countdown until a set time. You can choose to display the time left in a number of ways (minutes, seconds etc). When the item has expired it will flash to inform you that the task has expired - clicking on an expired item will show you the ExpiredItem dialog - here you can select what to do next - (e.g. Just acknowldge or change the time for the event - or change the Item type etc.) You can turn off flashing and change what is displayed when the item expires on the general tab.

From the right click menu you can Edit, Add, Delete and Disable items. You can also choose not to see the Details window of an item on the general tab as well, if you are showing it it will display the name and the description and item type and time left (or N/A) on the details window.

The Controls are resize aware so if you have a long task name it will be truncated to have "..." at the end if it is too long.

I hope you find it useful.

If you have any suggestions or find any bugs then let me know and i'll endevour to fix it as soon as poissible.

Mark

Possible Future Enhancements:
Allow importing of Outlook Tasks
Export and Import function - XML, CSV etc

Woohoo, first download. Looks great, will have to play with the options a bit, but it looks pretty nice. Do you think you could make the colors configurable from a skin? The blues look out of place in my slate colored skin and having to change the colors everytime you change a skin would be a pain. Great job.

Yeah I was thinking about that and agree - I have tested it on a few machines here in the office - and they all have different skins and I agree it is a pain - will be in the next version for sure.

Glad you like it

Looks nice. I had some problems with the details window though.

I have the same problem as eitaneko.
And a minor thing - I'm used to the OK-Cancel buttons ordered the opposite way of the way that you ordered them in your dialogs, so lots of times I just clicked Cancel without paying attention. No biggie at all though.
This panel's functionality is great!
I think you should try making use of the DS SDK components rather than .NET Controls in the panel - they'll fit better in DS (skin-wise). For example, use an IListOutput for the todo list, and ISkinButton for the toolbar. Look at the SDK Docs forum for more help about them if you need.

Hmmm not sure why the Details window is showing up like that - but i'll look into it. The reason that I am not using IListOutput and ISkinButton is that I wanted to have total control of the look and feel. I find that sometimes things that should be easy to do are hard because of the what the methods are allowed on these (and other) Interfaces.

I'll look into making a new version that allows use of those items though.

As for the details window - I wrote my own control that replaced the Label control because some people have difficulties with using them - they crash on Non NET1.1 SP1 machines - out of interest which Skin are you using - as I have tried it on all the ones on my machine and it seems to work fine.

I'll redo the details window a different way to see it makes a difference.

Hmmm, I haven't gotten the details window error, but I am wondering how exactly your alarm type thing works? I set it to have a task need to be done at a certain time, but it didn't pop up or change color at that time.

I'm using the skin iStyle2

I had some problems with text items overlapping each other on the details screen as well. I am using the Longhorn Nature Blue skin.

'bird

Ahah! Now I see the issue you guys were having, I was just getting impatient and clicking. Its strange, it shows up properly on a mouseover, but then it repaints itself and the information goes away.

New version posted

Version 1.1