Getting screen size minus Windows taskbar

Question

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good way to get the actual size of a screen, minus the windows tastbar.
I'd like to set the size of my program to the maximum available size of the screen realestate.
Currently, I just get the screen resolution via the ToolKit, and I just check to see if the OS is windows, and I take into account that the tastbar is probably visible, and take a few pixels off. Obviously not a very good way to handle the situation.
However, whenever you call a JFrame to maximize itself, it takes the tastbar into account, so I'm wondering if there's some way to access this information myself.
Even a way to programatically call the JFrame to maximize itself so I can then find it's size would work.
TIA.

Answer 1

There's no clean way to determine the screen size sans the task bar. If you're using jdk1.4, I suppose you could maximize a frame window as you thought. Otherwise, there's no frame maximize state prior to jdk1.4. If you're desperate for a semi-clean approach, you could always access the visiblity and dimensions of the task bar via JNI.
fyi, a frame "knows" the proper maximized bounds because it is a native window i.e., Windows handles the maximized boundary of frames, not the AWT.