Most us have used the small calendar that pops-up when when you click the clock running on the system tray. I don't know what this is officially called, so I am calling it the System Calendar (Not to be confused with Windows Calendar)
When you click on the clock a calendar comes up and I almost always use this when talking someone on a possible meeting date or appointment.
Last week when working with this calendar I came across a feature that I did not know existed and it was a surprisingly useful and cool feature (I am not sure if this a Vista feature or it existed in XP too and I don't have a XP machine now to check).
If you want to check the calendar of a different month, you can click those small arrows to move next or previous. Obviously this can become cumbersome if you need to move more than a couple of months.
So once I clicked on the month,year displayed in the top and I got this animation that collapses the calendar and shows all the months. This is a feature that I have used multiple times now (especially when looking for Microsoft event dates etc, which are usually 4-6 months away).
Continuing to click on the top display collapses the calendar away till you reach the decades level.
This is indeed a very useful feature hidden away and most probably 90% of the Vista users do not even know about this feature.
Developer Notes
I was curious to see if this feature is available thru out the system or only in the system tray. The first area I tried was the Control Panel, Date and Time Setting. This was available there.
So I kind of curious to see if this was actually built into the control itself. The calendar is a common control available to the Windows developer. So if this feature is built into the common control, then everyone using the common control will actually get this feature.
So I tried writing a small .NET windows app.
This feature seems to be built into the Common Control set. So when I used the DateTimePicker in my WinForm application, I had the same feature available in my application too.
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