viksoe.dk Control Panel applet

Originally the Windows Template Library (WTL) was touted as a library for creating small and efficient tools in C++. You would think, "Oh, a library for creating Control Panels Applets then. They are small.". I actually use WTL for nearly all my Windows projects; some are quite large with more than 200,000 lines of code. WTL just seems more Straight forward compared to using MFC or even other frameworks with gnarly C++ syntax and WTL is certainly not a library designed just for small tools. But eventually the day came when I needed to write a Control Panel Applet myself. And this is the helper class I came up with. The Windows Control Panel was one of the areas in Windows Vista that received some interesting improvements. The Control Panel view has moved from a strictly pick-an-icon view, to a task-oriented view where you locate a task (textual Link) that matches your desired action. For the untrained Windows user, finding exactly the right task to click on can be just as difficult, but fortunately the user can make use of the Search wordwheel to try to locate a task. Each task can be associated with a number of keywords, so that the Control Panel can list tasks that hopefully matches the user`s wordwheel ramblings.