Organizing commands and UI matters

I'm creating an application that has should have a style like VS.NET
(or any other IDE).

What I would like to know is what is the best way to handle menus, tool
bars
and context menus. How can this be done? The menus are dynamic so they
have
to be determined with each click. But how does it work?

Let's take VS itself: If I single-click in the project view on a file
node
some things happens. I.e. the properties view is refreshed. But also
the
menu and the tool bars. If I even right click on the node a context
menu
appears. What do you think how this works?

Is there a selection event that is received by the 'main app' which
then
determines which menu and tool bar items to show? Or are those items
provided by the project view which gets merged into the main menu and
tool
bars somehow?

And where is the logic which determines which items has to be enabled
or
checked or visualized? Is there one intelligent class or package that
controls that for the whole application? Conside that I select a file
node,
a project node and a folder at the same time. Who or what determines
the
available commands?

Consider also that I'd like to establish a MVC architecture. So I have
commands somewhere and I have the graphical representation of those. As
menu entries, tool bar items or context menu items. But not the
graphical presentation is the problem. And also not the command
pattern. It is about the logic when to make which command available for
the user.

Also I'm not clear how to organize the commands. I guess there will
usually be quite a lot. Am I right that commands tend to be flat and
broad and less deep (not much inheritance)?

Quite sophistacted for me. Do you know links, articles or books about
this subject?


Thanks in advance,
Robert

.

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