I currently have 3 very similar, but slightly different mfc applications, which would normally be opened at the same time as part of their workflow and usage in a Windows environment. I would like to keep them as 3 separate applications, but somehow group them together, under a single UI container to provide more clarity to the user.
I've so far considered using named pipes to send data from two of the applications to the third, the latter one being solely responsible for drawing the GUI (possibly having 3 different tabs at the highest GUI level, one for each application). I got this idea from SergeWautier's answer from this post. After looking into the possibility of doing this, there seems to be a lot of work involved in achieving this.
Is there any other (possibly simpler) way of achieving something similar?
Old answer
I have in the mean time come across the TaskSpace tool, which is the closest thing to what I'm looking for. It's liteware and getting the full functionality (e.g. saving a particular tabbing configuration, which I am most interested in) requires purchasing a licence. What would be really cool would be to restrict the user from adding any other windows apart from the 3 applications and have better control over the titles of the tabs & top-level window. At this point, writing a similar tool to TaskSpace would be the ideal solution.
I've also been playing around with tidytabs. It's not exactly what I want, because it doesn't provide a 'wrapper GUI', but I thought it's worth mentioning here in case it helps someone else.
Update
I've found exactly what I was looking for in Window Tabifier, which is open source and I can modify to fit my needs in accordance with the CPOL Licence provided. Very nicely written code too.