Microsoft Windows is the most popular operating system in the world, the development and experience of Windows products is always one of the most popular topics that people are talking. Here we are focusing on the icons that most of the Windows versions produced. To compare or to see a revolution, it doesn’t matter. Most of the old icons can be seen as very classical icons that Microsoft has brought to us.

I am a Windows user and I have been using Windows since the very early stage. The first Windows I have ever used was Windows 3.0, and unlike an operating system, it was to me a kind of fancy application running on DOS (disk operating system). I clearly remember that to install a Windows 3.1 took about more than an hour on my 80386 PC and it was stored on 12 separated 5 inch floppy disks. Now let’s have a look at the revolution of Windows icons.

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Yesterday, I just received the newsletter from BCGSoft for the release of BCGControlBar Pro version 10.3. As I provide the GUI design and coding service here, therefore I would like to introduce a little bit of BCGControlBar which I used in many of my developed projects.

BCGControlBar Pro (by BCGSoft) is a very good graphic user interface (GUI) library for MFC developer. It has recently been integrated into the MFC library in Visual Studio .NET 2008. The .NET version library is also available. But to me BCGControlBar Pro is the most powerful lib for GUI development as it implement many nice UI features in typical windows applications. Most of the features are taken from Microsoft products such as Ribbon in Office 2007, Outlook like sidebar, intelligent docking.

I have been using BCGControlBar Pro for 7 years since when I was in the second year as a undergraduate student. I got a BCGControlBar Pro version 6.3 from my tutor and was required to do some development of a medical software. Actually, only a few nice features were used in that application. Below I would like to introduce some nice features of BCGControlBar Pro and their applications in developments.

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