Cheat's Outlook Bar

Download :

CheatsOutlookBar_demo.zip
CheatsOutlookBar_src.zip

Introduction

I believe there's an old saying, "Clothes maketh the man", and this definitely applies to software too. No matter how clever and hard-working your applications are, if they're not wearing the latest well-designed clothes, people will think they are poorly written and out of date.

While working on a new project recently, I did a quick search on the web to see what the competition was up to. One of the features they had, which I didn't, was an Outlook-style menu bar, commonly referred to simply as an Outlook Bar. Deciding I wanted one too, I thought about writing my own. Searching the Code Project, I found two useful articles, Marc Clifton's An Outlook Bar Implementation, and Outlook XP bar by ACorbs. Both these articles were interesting and thought-provoking, and I downloaded each of them for a bit of a poke around, as one does!

I then found myself in a bit of a dilemma. I didn't want to simply copy someone else's code, but at the same time, I didn't want to spend hours and hours reinventing the wheel. I remembered a comment made by my manager at a previous job, many years ago. "What are we trying to do here? Achieve technical excellence, or get a job done?" Realising that Marc and ACorbs had done the former, I decided to go for the latter approach, and started doing some lateral thinking.

Coppy Right :http://www.codeproject.com/KB/menus/CheatsOutlookBar.aspx

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