> IronPython That'd be fine. > By design, and 100% up to the app creator. Alt-Tab > switches between things on the taskbar. Things are > minimized

> IronPython That'd be fine. > By design, and 100% up to the app creator. Alt-Tab > switches between things on the taskbar. Things are > minimized to the tray to keep them out of the way! Right. So the thread is about things that are wrong with the OS. The way it is may be up to the app creator. But it /should/ be not-at-all influenced by the app creator. Alt+tab is a platform feature, not an application feature. Its value is tied to the consistency of its behavior. If I minimise something, regardless of where it minimises to, it should go to the back of the app stack. That's what the user (me) expects from alt+tab. By the same principle, there shouldn't be ghost windows from Excel appearing in the alt+tab list. I'm particularly harsh on excel because it's Microsoft's own app, and it has behaviours that undermines the platform. > Start off with the old time favorites like TCP/IP > loopback and named pipes (both of which are pretty > darn easy to get up and running) and go on from > there. For my stuff, when I need this on Windows I just roll a TCP/IP even loop in python, and have that act as a message broker. But that's not an option for people who don't grok TCP/IP, which has a fair learning curve. You want a mechanism for casual developers where it's easy to tie things together. e.g. Have a batch script send data to a visual basic app. Maybe named pipes is good, haven't looked at that in windows. The best take on this stuff that I've seen is the Be API. It has a cascade of IPC systems from unix-style console pipes up to sophisticated and high-performance message passing. All of it is easily accessible from a single set of python wrappers.