ATL COM Based Addin Framework

Building a product which suits to every customers requirement is every Companies dream. But in practice this may not be the case. This is because in most of the cases the requirement keep on changing drastically so that we have to make changes in the code level , recompile it, test it and ship it as another version. This way of development is not efficient in terms of project cost and developmental effort. This is where the Addin / Plugin architecture wins. In this article I have written a ATL COM Addin / Plugin Framework with dynamic toolbars and menu support . This framework is actually based on the VC++ 6.0 Addin Architecture which Microsoft used in every MS Office based applications (not sure of the exact implementation , just a guess work, because I followed the same path of VC++ Addin wizard generated code ). One difference, instead of adding menus , their description and other details in a new line delimited fashion in VC++ Addin , I used XML format for adding the Plugin details (Don't know why Microsoft didn't use XML?, perhaps at that time XML was not standardized , or is there any other specific reason??) along with Component Category for categorizing the plugins. You can add more properties as leaf nodes if you want (I followed the Idea of adding menu properties as nodes. Alternatively you can put the properties in some other fashion too). More ..