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Business Challenge
User interface components produced by our customer allow software developers to design professionally
looking and authentic Microsoft Windows applications. They are used world-wide by millions of developers.
The customer is keeping up by producing new components and applying new trends in UI design. Some of the
components are free, and to keep the costs low, the customer outsourced some of the development overseas.
At the same time, requirements to the product quality remains strict, and the provider should have excellent
skills and development practices.
Software Solution
Our customer engaged Axmor's .NET developers to port the task panel component written for MFC / C++ to .NET / C#.
The developed component imitates Windows Explorer task panel and helps developers present information in the
application in the most convenient and intuitive way. The component can also be used as Visual Studio .NET style
toolbox and supports all habitual manipulations like drag-and-drop and properties set up.
The component developed by Axmor Software team should follow the same high quality standards and best practices
as all other components in the customer's toolkit. The most critical requirement was to imitate perfectly the
look and behavior of Window Explorer. The customer also needed seamless integration into the popular development
environment, compliant with industry development standards, proper documentation and development of a sample
application. Read further to discover how Axmor .NET developers managed this.
Perfect imitation of Windows Explorer
In the implementation of the task panel control, Axmor Software developers need to fully imitate Windows Explorer
on one hand, and on the other, develop the product identically to the existing MFC version of the component.
To address this challenge, our developers performed requirements re-engineering. They also needed to address the
differences between visual elements rendering in MFC and .NET development framework to meet customer's requirement.
As a result, the developed final product passed all severe and comprehensive customer's tests.
.NET Frameworks support
Task panel component developed by Axmor Software supports .NET 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, moreover it was prepared and made
ready for .NET 3.0.
Integration with the development environment
Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio products was one of the key and challenging requirements of our customer.
Axmor .NET developers seamlessly incorporated it into Visual Studio versions 2002, 2003 and 2005 using API that
is very specific for each version.
The task panel component can be used directly from within the usual development environment the same way as other
built-in Visual Studio components. It is made available at the time the developer designs a Windows Form along with
component documentation that is implemented as a part of Visual Studio Help service and is content sensitive.
Sample Application
The component was written along with a 'sample application' that demonstrates how to utilize it to software
developers. This application provides a task panel created with help from designed tool that contains different menu
items placed with different images. For the sample application, the user can select a design theme and a predefined
behavior that the customer's component library supports.
Industry-standard Development
Customer's product was developed by following industry standards and the same expectation was required from us.
First, it was critical to meet Microsoft's .NET Design Guidelines for Class Library. In addition, all classes were
properly documented and most importantly, they were supplied with sample code. The developed code is 80% covered by
unit tests, which simplified testing, acceptance and further product maintenance.
Our customer was fully satisfied with the quality levels our .NET developers provided and how all applicable
standards and guidelines were followed. We are proud to say that the tool developed by Axmor is used by so many
developers around the world as a part of our customer's popular UI component toolkit.
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