Ribbon

The Ribbon is a collection of controls and behaviors that together let you implement the latest Office 2007 style menus and toolbars in your application, also known as "Ribbon". The Ribbon is designed to make the commands in your application much more accessible to your end-users. Commands can be easily organized in logical groups, which are rendered under tabs. Some tabs can also be shown only on as needed basis.

The Ribbon Tabs let you categorize the commands you want to display to your end-users and render the categorized commands within tabs.

A RibbonTab contains RibbonBars and RibbonButtons.

Ribbon Control also supports contextual tabs which can be kept hidden and shown only in certain contexts. Any number of contextual tabs can be added to a ribbon control.

Very rarely when the width of the window becomes too small, a scrollbar will be shown to let your end users scroll hidden tabs into view.

Within a RibbonTab RibbonBars are used to group the RibbonButtons. This lets you create another level of categorization of your commands to make it easy for your end-users to find the commands they are looking for.

There is also a special "SplitButton" kind of RibbonButton which the user can use in 2 ways: Click on the button part to invoke a "default command" or click on the drop down portion to select a command from a list of commands displayed in the dropdown.

RibbonBar also has the ability to show a scrollbar button to scroll the contents horizontally when the width of the control becomes too low.

RibbonButtons corresponds directly to the commands you want to expose to your end-users. RibbonButtons can be hosted inside a RibbonBar or can be hosted inside the Application Menu.

The RibbonButtons fully integrate with the WPF Command Framework. They expose a Command property where you can simply specify the command to invoke (Application or custom commands). You can also optionally use the CommandParameter and CommandTarget settings.

The RibbonButtons can be displayed in Large and Small button modes.

RibbonButtons can also be associated with Tooltips to provide the end-user more information regarding the underlying command when he mouse hovers on the button.

The Application Menu is equivalent to the "File" menu of traditional menu UIs. It's represented by the circular button on the top-left of the frame. The image in the button can be customized.

QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR

The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is used to render a set of RibbonButtons that are most commonly used in the application. It's rendered right next to the Application Menu button to make it easily accessible for the end-user.

The QAT can also be easily customized by the end-user using the built-in QAT Context Menu. End-users can choose to place it above or below the ribbon, remove certain commands from the QAT and also add other commands into the QAT. QAT is also intelligent in preventing the user from adding multiple instances of the same command to the toolbar.

Simply right click on a QAT button to remove it from the toolbar.

Similarly, simply right click on a button in the ribbon to add it to the QAT.

There is also a "Customize Quick Access Toolbar" dialog that can be invoked by the end user, as the name suggests, to fully customize the set of commands that they want to display in the QAT. The full set of commands that are available in the application are exposed to the end-user.

Ribbon control supports KeyTips or access keys that can be associated with RibbonButtons. This lets your end-users to quickly access a command with a few keys, no matter where they are in the program. When the user presses the Alt key, the KeyTips for the commands in the current tab are displayed. Pressing the letter in the KeyTip will invoke that command. If the KeyTip for a hidden ribbon tab is pressed then that tab will be made visible.

Ribbon control fully supports Right to Left rendering for supporting RTL cultures.

Ribbon control ships with a number of built-in themes like Office2007 Silver, Office 2007 Blue and Office 2007 Black.

Custom colors can also be applied to the Ribbon Control.

The Ribbon control provides you the ability to embed a Gallery control within the ribbon. The gallery control can be embedded in 2 modes. They are InRibbon or DropDown modes.

Ribbon control extends its gallery support to gallery filters which is a handy control used to categorize and filter the elements in the gallery controls.

The MiniToolBar is a light weight, floating toolbar that can be dynamically shown and hidden for certain contexts. A good example is text editing. When the user selects a text in the editor, you could show the MiniToolbar next to the text to quickly let the user Bold it, italicize it, etc.,

RibbonControl is fully compatible for use within Views in an XBAP setup.

Ribbon control ships with Vista Window Glass support to enhance its visual look and feel.