Q. Is there a way to programmatically modify the applications pinned to the Taskbar in Windows 7?

A. Several people mailed me this and I couldn't find a direct way to do it. After research, I found the DeploymentGuys at Microsoft had written a script to achieve this using Shell objects. The reason there's no direct way to add or remove pinned items is to stop application installs from automatically pinning their programs to the taskbar. Head over to this Microsoft blog to get the script to modify the pinned applications.