Category : softwareengineering

When I started learning programming with the .NET framework, I started by using WinForms as a UI technology. It uses “classic” menus just like this office 2000:

A few years later Office 2007 was released, the ribbon was born:

And even some years later Office 2010 was released, which also added new features like the stage:
A few days ago Office 15 preview was released and they added more fancy new stuff:

That’s huge progress IMO, but why don’t they enable the developers to build UI’s like them? When I have a look at .NET, there’s still no way to build a ribbon. Even with WPF, which is highly extensible, there are no premade controls. So the community has started several projects to create all those “features”. I know, today Microsoft has released a ribbon for WinForms and WPF, but that’s still not part of any core framework (not even the 4.5 one). But this is not limited to .NET as far as I know? Today there are still no APIs for unmanaged applications to create those ribbon UI..

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From time to time I’ve encountered scenarios where several complex conditions need to be met prior to triggering an event. Furthermore, most listeners also run additional checks to determine the course of action. This got me thinking whether a better solution would be to think in terms of smaller events and let them trigger inside each ..

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In c++, the * operator can be overloaded, such as with an iterator, but the arrow (->) (.*) operator does not work with classes that overload the * operator. I imagine that the preprocessor could easily replace all instances of -> with (*left).right, and that would make iterators nicer to implement. is there a practical reason for -> to be different, or is that just a peculiarity of the language/desi..

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I am writing a utility that runs on RHEL5 command line. I need my command line options to be simple but powerful. I looked at the various UNIX utilities to get an idea of how simple command line utilities have to be. Do you guys suggest any documents/links that talk about command line etiquette? I am modelling my utility on top of LVM (that’s all the info I can give for now). I know it’s a software engineering question, but I thought it would be appropriate to post here. Please advi..

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