Some time back we had seen the Control Panel Applets and how they can be used to provide easy configuration options for your applications. But control panel is becoming obsolete now, besides it's not the best solution for providing configuration options for your application. If every application which has something to configure provides a control panel applet, the control panel will become cluttered with applets. Microsoft realised this problem and came up with Microsoft Management Consoles.

MMC is an application very much like control panel, which provides a single location (and look & Feel) for management/configuration of various applications/systems settings.

There is a whole chapter devote to MMC in the MSDN which you can locate here: Setup and System Administration -> Microsoft Management Consoles.

Now what's important for us the developers, is MMC snap ins. Snap ins are the views or configuration options which can be viewed in the MMC and from where the configurations can be changed. I hope you all must have used them.

These are actually dll (COM in proc servers) which implement certain COM interfaces to integrate with the MMC. The list of these and their details are available in MSDN. You should go through those.

There are various sample available (C++) which implement MMC snap ins and demonstrate how to use the MMC interfaces etc. You can find these samples in the MMC C++ Sample Snap ins topic in the above given location. Go through this sample in detail and try to customize it/experiment with it to learn more about snap ins.

As I said, the control panel applets are now becoming obsolete and microsoft does not recommend them for new OS's. Besides, users are becoming heavily addicted to the MMC for all their configuration needs. So it's very important for us to be able to write our own snap ins for any big applications we develop which require a lot of configuration and tuning.