I don't see why the comments were so derogatory. This is a perfectly reasonable question in an enterprise setting. Heck, Internet Explorer offers something around 1300 different possible group policy settings for administrative control. Why wouldn't a Microsoft platform developer expect something similar from the Sidebar?
This is an ongoing theme of Raymond Chen's blog. He posts something (anything) about Windows, no matter how informative or unbiased, and there are at least a hundred comments describing how stupid Microsoft is.
In an enterprise setting, this would be fairly trivial to do, either through group policies (do not allow sidebar modifications), or sheer workarounds. He said there is not a supported way, not that it was impossible.
Also, Raymond has posted similar topics to this before. Such as: why can't you make a topmost window over other topmost windows? A: It then becomes an arms race, and then everybody wants a top-topmost window.
I would not expect this sort of inane behavior out of an API. A window is either forced to the top via API (or a gadget is at the top of a sidebar), or it's not. I don't expect special treatment.
I agree with you. "Don't tell me what I can't do" is a philosophy that Microsoft's biggest customers pay for.
Raymond replied down in the thread: "In this case, it was not for a specialized scenario but a program for a general audience."
OK, in that case, we can taunt that developer, but it wasn't clear from the post itself which seems to ignore valid use cases. Think about a billing widget at Kinkos or vital metrics on a shared terminal in a factory.
In my opinion, the correct response would have been "Sorry, we don't support that feature because it damages the user experience for home users. Also, we didn't think we could engineer a fully extensible sidebar in a meaningful way given our schedule. If you have an enterprise need, you can provide your own widget host and override the entire sidebar via group policy."
