An developer oriented alt + space launcher inspired by Launchy and Hain. Written with extensibility in mind. The goal is to have a framework for easily adding new functionality and extending existing functionality.

The motivation comes from wanting more from existing convenience applications and not liking their extension models.

1. Names are hard
2. Pandas are lazy and laziness drove me to write this
3. I figured a panda logo would be pretty easy to make

This application makes heavy use of MEF. The philosophy behind the application architecture is that as a application programmer you can just "ask" for things to be available for you when its your turn to do something. Conversely, if you are framework designer, you can simply export an implentation for a specific interface and then whoever has a reference to that interface can "ask" for your service. Moreover, you should be able to do all this without configuration. The goal is to be able to drag + drop a new .dll and on application restart -have new functionality.

For example, you might want to create an alerting launcher that periodically checks splunk or logic monitor for signs of well known problems. Upon triggering an alert, a toast notification pops up, and upon clicking the toast notification the UI renders showing you the details of the altert.

Also, you know, games and stuff.

Launchers are Windows that provide some kind of user interface that does something useful. If you want to extend Panda to do something cool, you probably want to start here. Pretty much anything you can you do with a Window you can make into a launcher.

Recommendations:

1. Favor the MVVM design pattern
2. Have your VM depend on Observables for events
3. Use the provided launchers as exemplars

Services are the main source of functionality and plugin specific events. Services are whatever you want them to be. I make no restrictions on the API you can provide. That being said, I recommend the following guide lines:

1. Expose IObservables for changes in state
2. Favor asynchronous APIs to synchronous
3. TBD

Anything can have settings. Settings can be anything serializable. Settings are created almost immediately after start up, so you cannot use anything injected. If you need settings simply add a dependency on ISettingsService and get whatever settings you are interested in. If you want to create settings just implement IPluginSettings.

Anything can receive events and anything can broadcast events. There are no restrictions on events other than that it implements IDomainEvent. To send and receive events add a dependency on IEventHub.

This is not for regular UI events or things that would be better suited to using injected components. Examples of good events are:

1. Intentional file deletion
2. Restarting of components
3. Shutdown requests