MKSTaskbarPlugin for VMware Workstation for Windows

I wrote this a few years ago and published it a few months ago — maybe someone will find it useful.

mksTaskbarPlugin is a DLL which loads both in the vmware-vmx.exe process (to get the screen image from the virtual machine) and the explorer.exe process (to interact with the Windows taskbar).

The result is that you can use extra space on your Windows taskbar to show a scaled-down, live-updating thumbnail image of your choice of VMware virtual machine running on the same host. This is useful for keeping an eye on long-running background operations like software installs in one VM while freeing up most of your screen to interact with other VMs or the host OS.