Project Description
A project on an Office-like Ribbon control.

Orb and QuickAccess toolbar now on Non-Client Area!

Important: Read the guide for embedding the ribbon on the non-client area.


This is a Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon Bar - like control for .NET, as all of the code in my site, is free and open source. At the time this is being written, is yet the best ribbon available for free.

Please refer to my site/blog www.menendezpoo.com for more on usage, development and news about this project

Introduction

Because of the lack of good free Ribbon controls on the web, I decided to write one myself. I've analyzed previous work on ribbon-controls. Unfortunately, most existent controls are merely bad tries. Why? well, some lack nice rendering, some lack resizing features, some lack almost everything. Of course, well developed Ribbon controls are available at a price. This ribbon is free.

Some of the design goals

Performance - This ribbon is contained on a Control window, and every element inside of it is managed as a bunch of bounds inside the control, just as the ToolStrip control does. Altough this is difficult to manage from the ribboon's inside code, this is a way to keep it at the best performed ribbon. Believe me, download the demo, run it and resize the window. It peforms beautifully.

Consistency with Office's ribbon - I read once about Jakob Nielsen saying that most users prefer the programs they use look just like word, excel or powerpoint. This is quite obvious, because people use this software every day. Providing visual consistency with the office's ribbon is very important because people already know what to expect from a ribbon-like interface. I've tried to every element in the ribbon look and behave exactly like it does in the Office's ribbon.

Ease of use for programmers - The naming of components is consistent with most WinForms names, even more with the ToolStrip elements. Property, event and method names for similar elements are named just like in the ToolStrip technology items.

Designer support - I will be adding more and more designer support so you can manage the ribbon 100% from the designer.

Using the Ribbon

The ribbon is located in the System.Windows.Forms namespace, just as every other control, I think it's annoying to use controls named as MyCoolFirm.MyCoolNameSpace.MyCoolSubNameSpace, and so on (Please do that only for bussiness objects).

You can add a reference to the compiled dll: System.Windows.Forms.Ribbon.dll or you can directly copy the source files to a folder on your project. The code is currently designed so you can just copy the source files, it doesn't need any extra resources.