A Tool I Really Want

Published 13 March 5 7:43 PM | GregLow

One of the suggestions I've been working on with the INETA and MSDN Connection folk is a professional coding competition. The Imagine Cup is a wonderful competition for university students but I keep thinking the code that is created just doesn't seem to end up anywhere, or at least not often.

What I think is needed is a competition for professional coders that offers significant recognition (a good prize would help too) but is targeted to produce something the community needs. The output of the competition would end up being donated to the community and become public domain. I think we need to suggest things that are really needed and we need to specify coding standards to maximise reuse of the code and to ease comparisons.

To kick this off, I'm offering a first suggestion for something that could be built. I'd like your feedback on it and on other topics. I'm hoping to kick these around at CodeCampOz as well for those that are there.

1st Suggestion: WinForm Access Keys

Setting tab orders was a major pain in the neck in VB6 and the new tab order editor in later versions of VS has removed any excuse for forms with poor tab orders. However, setting access/shortcut keys for controls, etc. is still a pain in the neck. I'd like to see a project that provides a tool that does the following:

1. Add-in for VS.NET that works with either VB.NET or C#.

2. Once you ask it to, it removes and resets all access keys (eg Open becomes &Open) for the form.

3. The tool allows for an XML-based list of “preferred keys“ in order of importance. (ie F for File menu, H for Help menu, etc if these exist). This would allow application of both Windows style guidelines and corporate standards.

4. It also processes any sub-menus if the form has a menu.

There needs to be some way to indicate which controls need access keys eg: some labels should have them, some shouldn't. Perhaps this is an extender provider or perhaps the tool just pops up a list of controls with check boxes so you can select which controls it applies to.

What do you think?