EXAMPLE : MICROSOFT VISUAL COMPONENT MANAGER

    The Visual Component Manager (VCM) makes it easy for teams of developers to share a wide range of component types, enabling effective component and code reuse both within a development team and across an entire organization. The VCM allows developers to easily publish, find, and catalog components, including ActiveX controls, COM Components, Java Applets, HTML and ASP pages, and source code projects and snippets.

                                                Figure-1: The Visual Component Manager snapshot

    Visual Component Manager lets developers publish components, source code, and other objects into a central, shared repository. Other developers can then browse the repository and use those components in their own development projects, encouraging code reuse and reducing development time and cost.

    The VCM's native store is the Microsoft Repository 2.0, allowing components to be stored in either SQL Server or Access databases. The VCM allows many repository databases to be open simultaneously, so the developer is able to maintain a set of component repositories; for example, a personal component repository on Access, a project team component repository on SQL Server, and an organization-wide repository on SQL Server. Both the VCM and the Repository will be extensible through SDKs, allowing third parties and end users to build repository applications and VCM handlers to mange their specific component types.

    The VCM allows developers to manage their components using the familiar Explorer UI: a tree view of components, the component list view, the properties pane, the component properties dialog box. The Publish and Export Wizard enables the publishing, republishing, and extraction of components. Developers can also search for an existing component in the repository through the component manager. The Visual Component Manager enables teams of developers to reuse components in large development projects by serving as the "librarian" of components.