I usually spend a lot of time to give my projects a nice and user friendly GUI. In my opinion, in all desktop projects, it's "almost" mandatory to give the user something that can speed-up functions that are frequently used. The simpler (and most commonly used) method is to build a toolbar. Visual Studio comes with a toolbar editor but, really, I hate it; it's still limited to 16 colors, it can't load external images, and every time you want to add a new button, it is a pain. For all these reasons, I wrote my own toolbar editor for the Visual Studio IDE.
Once Installed you can start to edit toolbars in a few steps:
Open the resource file (.rc) of the project that you want to edit (or create a new toolbar)
Select the resource ID from the combo box.
Click on "Scan" button to get the preview of the currently loaded toolbar.
Edit the toolbar
Merge the modification to the resource file using the “SAVE TOOLBAR” button
History
1.0 - (2005/08/02)
First public release
1.1 - (2005/08/03)
Fixed some compatibility issues with VC6
1.2 - (2005/08/05)
Now it's possible to parse more files with IDs
Linked statically to avoid dependency problems
Changed true color bitmap generation checkbox to true as default
Now, if available, a true color bitmap is used to create the imagelist when a toolbar is opened
Disabled "error diffusion" in 16 color bitmap creation
1.3 - (2005/09/12)
Added "new" toolbar feature
Added hot imagelist creation
Added some accelerators
Added MRU list
Improved drag and drop (now you can use it to move buttons also, and replace only the image by holding the CTRL key)
Fixed bug when two buttons have the same ID
1.3b - (2005/10/27)
Added check for update routine
Fixed bug caused by MRU implementation (crash on startup)
Fixed bug with 16 colors bitmap (ugly view in preview)
1.3c - (2005/11/06)
Some internal modification on code to prepare the new release
Fixed bug on "check for updates routine"
1.3d - (2006/07/04)
Some internal modification on code to prepare the new release (again)
Better error handling during parsing
Minor bug-fix
1.41 - (2008/01/05) **SHIPON**
New dialog Layout to handle toolbars up to 48x48px
Better icon handling: now before use they are all ported to true color
Added support for png images/icons
Fixed bug on reopening an existing toolbar without a true color bitmap
Fixed bug on first toolbar display: listcontrol without icon preview
Minor bug fixes
1.42 - (2009/03/31) **SHIPON**
New function to select transparent color
Fixed bug that cause wrong background color selection
Fixed crash if wrong toolbar id is selected for parsing
1.50 - (2011/07/09) **P.WIP**
Program default data directory moved to [USERAPPDATA] windows default folder. This is to avoid administrative user rights requirement in Vista/Windows 7.
Added a more detailed manual to the installation package
Moved to shared MFC linking to reduce EXE file dimension
Fixed bug on the new function to select the background color
Fixed bug on first toolbar display: listcontrol without icon preview
Minor bug fixes
1.60 - (2012/10/19) ***** FIREWORKS ****
Improvements
Imagelist editing
Rotate image: now the rotate image function is enabled
Resize image now use a better resizing algorithm
Export image to library function
Some improvements in the option dialog: “autodetect” feature of afxres.h file (works with visual studio 2005 up to 2010)
the background color is now prevented to be changed by the optimization of the palette when a bitmap < 24 bit is saved (16 color bitmap for example)
Better toolbar layout and document handling
Some UI improvements
BugFix
Fixed a bug during saving of gray scale bitmaps (bitmap file wrongly reported as 4bit depth)
