All The Good Ones Were Taken

MicroMenu

From my past life as a CAD monkey in process plant engineering, MicroMenu was an icon-menu addon for Intergraph's PDS2D and Intergraph/Bentley's MicroStation CAD software.

It was initially written in 1997 as "MacroMenu" for the old MicroStation-based versions of Intergraph PDS2D, as a standalone Visual Basic program that used SendKeys to enter commands from a single icon menu. I wrote the proof-of-concept in an evening, after our sysadmin spent several months failing to customise PDS2D's own menu system for us.

Screenshot

I later modified it to provide multiple menus, for use in MicroStation, as seen in the unblurred parts of the screenshots below:

Screenshot Screenshot

Later still, when SendKeys became increasingly unreliable, and MicroStation gained VBA integration, I rewrote it again within MicroStation VBA, so that it could use the provided APIs to inject commands directly.

Screenshot Screenshot

Menu content was stored as a series of bitmap images and text files, allowing any user to make changes with common tools like MS Paint and Notepad. Microstations own GUI customisation facilities were rather more esoteric.

Over the years, I added a library of custom CAD macros and commands written in MicroStation BASIC or VBA.

Over its lifespan, from 1997 until at least 2015, MicroMenu and its libraries saved thousands of workhours and improved drafting quality through:

Since this software was written for and remains the property of a former employer, I am unable to provide downloads of source code or executable files.