Matias Woloski’s Blog

Reusing is
a common requirement in any team or framework. However, we usually reuse at
business logic or general infrastructure level. The User Interface reuse is
more difficult to achieve. CAB architecture is loosely coupled enough to make
that possible.

The
following screenshots illustrates the bank teller quickstart application hosted
in Outlook, Word and a regular Winforms application.

Just two
lines of code [:)]

Instructions:

1. Download the solution
2. Extract
   the solution and build it. If you experience problems, check that
   the references to the CAB assemblies are correct.

Create
the shell and the CAB application

1. Create a
   new project to host the shell and the CAB application.

   The shell in a regular CAB application would be a Form. However if we
   want to host the application in a different executable (Outlook, Word, IE,
   etc), we already have the container. So the Shell will be a UserControl.

2. Add
   references to CAB assemblies.
3. Create a
   regular UserControl and place the workspaces, menus, toolstrip, statusbar,
   and everything related to the shell.
4. If you
   need to override the CAB events like AfterShellCreated or
   AddBuilderStrategies, create a new class that derives from CompositeUIExtensions.Hosting.UserControlShellApplication

   where TUserControlShell is the type of the UserControl created on the previous step
   and TWorkItem is the root work item that
   must derives from UserControlWorkItem.

Consume
a CAB module/app from Outlook/Word/External application

1. Open your
   project and add references to CompositeUIExtensions.Hosting and the CAB assemblies. Also
   copy the project related assemblies (module assemblies for example) to the
   application output directory.
2. Creates
   an instance of CompositeUIExtensions.Hosting.UserControlHost and add it to the
   correspondent Controls collection. The following code illustrates how;

UserControlHost plugin = 	new UserControlHost();…Controls.Add( plugin );

1. Create
   
   the ProfileCatalog.xml, configure it with the desired module/s and set the

   Build Action to CopyAlways. 

Download

the solution that shows how to host the BankTeller app inside Outlook, Word and

Winforms.