New VB.NET sample application coming soon...

I’m now working on a utilitarian type application that will allow you to manage your Internet Explorer favorites in a much better way. Well, at least in a way that I find ‘better’. ;-) I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and now it’s begun.

Since there are a ton of these types of applications that exist today out in the wild, there’s not really any reason to do anything serious with this application so I’m going to be making it available to everyone at no cost. I wasn’t impressed with the free ones available and the ones that cost money just didn’t seem to have enough in them to justify the costs. Will what I’m working on be as good as what is already available, don’t know. I just started on it tonight and have gotten pretty far already; so who knows what this utility will grow into.

Basically, I’m setting it up in a three pane layout (similar to the Outlook 2003 layout) where the first pane is the folders, second pane is the favorites in that folder and the third pane being a embedded browser. This way you can click on a favorite, see the page and decide what the favorite should really be called and what folder it should go in. Drag and drop is enabled to move the favorites into other folders. Context menus are available that allow you to add/remove/rename folders and remove/rename favorites.

As it is now, I save favorites to my desktop. Then, it gets so cluttered, I end up copying all of them to some other folder (usually called Stuff). Then, at some point that folder gets copied yet some other place and eventually I have favorites that I meant to get back to and can’t remember where they all were. The folders feature in IE is a good idea, but it’s not real conducive to browsing quickly. Basically, I’m wanting an application that allows me to dump bookmarks into and quickly be able to find something that I bookmarked when I get a chance to get back to whatever it was (which may be several months later). So obviously, future additions will included some sort of search mechanism, possibly a caching mechanism to allow deep searches of the HTML and I’m toying with the idea of leveraging a web service so that you can use the application on multiple computers (home and office) and have access to all your favorites.

From a development point of view, some of the principles going into this application will include drag and drop within tree view nodes and list view items (also within the application and cross application with IE and Windows Explorer), Docking and Anchoring, Context Menus… what else will be included, not really sure at this point (there will be a lot more, including the possibility of some Patterns & Practices). Most of these will probably be separated out into various articles showing how to accomplish the same tasks.

Let me know if your interested in this and what other types of coding sample(s) you might be interested in seeing demonstrated.