XP Sidebar/Taskbar style Navigation system - BinaryExplorerbar .NET emulates the look-and-feel of XP Sidebar Navigation bar, and additionally provides much more rich UI features via its properties that can let you customise the visual aspects of the various UI elements that makes BinaryExplorerBar .NET. The control also provides a feature-rich Collapsible/Expandible navigation/taskbar facility. The collapse/expand animation facility is completely configurable - for example, you can choose to have or not to have animation effects, you can set the animation speed intervals, and so on.

Rich design-time editing experience, and extensive properties support - The control comes with rich design-time support, making it easy to work with it. The design-time features supports full "in-place" editing. Almost everything that you can do with the control at run-time, can be done in the design-time in Visual Studio IDE. This includes, ability to:

• Resizing the panel
• Content scrolling
• Panel collapse/expand animation
• and more

All that, without ever having to leave your Visual Studio Form design surface. Just drag-and-drop the control instance, and a couple of mouse clicks.

Extensive UI customisation of control's elements - The control comes with ability to extensively customise its UI elements. This includes the ability to:

• Set different styles for drawing the control. The control supports Gradient, Solid brush and Image styles of drawing its background and title
• Render the panel's title background with user specified background image with its custom size
• Set the collapse/expand button image with your custom images, or to simply use our built-in, highly optimised GDI+ routine to draw the button
• Set the control's title image, background image and its transperancy colors with your custom values
• Set the various color aspects of the control, with your own color values

The Collapsible panel objects can be set to a disabled state. Accordingly, the panel object's title will also be drawn in disabled color.

The control comes with its rich events system. For example, one of the control's events lets you decide at run-time, as to whether a given panel object should perform a collapse/expand (based on its status-quo) when the user clicks on its title/collapse-expand buttons. This event comes handy in situations when you do not want to disable a panel object, but would just want to disable the user from collapsing/expanding the panel object.

Automatic support for emulating XP theme rendering - The control supports out-of-the-box rendering of its UI emulating any of the three popular XP themes. Through a simple method in the control, you can ask the control to render itself with an emulated XP theme color of your choice, irrespective of the currently active XP theme. Since the XP theme emulation is custom drawn by the control, it should be possible to use this feature even in theme unaware OSs like Windows 2000 Operating system.

Windows XP users : Just by setting a simple property, upon drag-and-drop of the control from the toolbox into your Windows Forms, the control will automatically identify the current active XP theme and will accordingly render itself with the appropriate color to emulate the active XP theme.

Windows 2000 and other non-XP users : After instantiating the control, just make a call to a specially defined method in the control, by specifying a desired XP theme (defined as an enumeration), and the control will instantly render itself with appropriate colors to emulate that specified XP theme.

The control also lets you define a custom theme of colours, thereby letting you render the control in custom themes as may be needed by your application.