SandRibbon for Silverlight

What's New in SandRibbon 2.0 for Silverlight

• NEW: Office 2010 theme introduced and made default.
• NEW: Ribbon popups can now be used as context menus on any control.
• NEW: Separators are now styled correctly within statusbars.
• NEW: SortKey property introduced on EditingContext to specify the relative order of editing contexts when multiple are displayed.
• NEW: Clicking on the titlebar will initiate a window drag when the ribbon is hosted in an out-of-browser application with elevated permissions.
• NEW: When an editing context title is longer than the tabs it contains, the display is lengthened to accommodate it where possible.
• FIX: Drawing could be incorrect when multiple editing contexts were active at the same time, each with multiple tabs.

What's New in SandRibbon for Silverlight V1.2

• NEW: Full designer integration with Visual Studio 2010 RC1.
• NEW: Gallery and RibbonGallery now support generation of their children via binding, and the ItemTemplate property.
• CHANGE: Minimum Silverlight platform is now 3.0.
• FIX: Any control added to a toolbar would have its TabStop property set to false; this should have only happened for buttons.

What's New in SandRibbon for Silverlight V1.1

• NEW: ToolBarTray and MenuBar classes provide traditional moveable toolbars and menubars for non-ribbon applications.
• NEW: ICommand integration is supported for buttons and menu items.
• NEW: CollapseAll static method added to RibbonPopup.
• NEW: SelectedTabChanged event added to the ribbon.
• FIX: Popups could appear below the ChildWindow in Silverlight 3.
• FIX: The buttons on in-ribbon galleries and the quick access toolbar could be incorrectly positioned in Silverlight 3.
• FIX: When toggling between minimized states the first tab would be selected rather than the previously-selected one.
• FIX: When disabling a button the mouse was hovering over, the hover effect could persist when re-enabled.
• FIX: An editing context displayed on the titlebar could overlap the quick access toolbar.
• FIX: Adding the ApplicationPopup to a ribbon at runtime could throw an exception.
• FIX: The Activate event on a GalleryButton could be fired twice when clicked.

What's New in V1.0.1:

Following on from the initial release, this build adds Office 2007 style ScreenTip capability to all controls, with support for text, description and imagery inside the tooltips. Live Preview functionality is also introduced in this build, and our online demos have been updated to showcase both new features.

Theming ability has been improved. Some minor bugs, mostly cosmetic in nature, have also been addressed.

The Silverlight Ribbon control suite was developed in part to encourage adoption of the Silverlight platform for business applications. The Office Ribbon user interface is an intuitive, compelling replacement for traditional menus and toolbars, and SandRibbon exposes virtually all UI features in a straightforward API. Divelements fully comply with the guidelines published by Microsoft for implementers of this system, which makes your job easier and brings peace of mind. Configuring and using the wealth of features packed into this suite is easy using XAML.

Divelements wrote a custom popup system from scratch to power many of the features in SandRibbon. Ribbon minimization conserves screen space by moving ribbon tabs into popups. The application popup contains commands applicable to the whole application, and an optional display area where controls such as a recently-used documents list can be placed. Galleries provide a scrollable viewport on to lists of buttons that can display images designed to show the effects of commands. Divelements provide both popup, resizable galleries and in-ribbon galleries.

One of the most compelling features in a ribbon layout is automatic resizing. SandRibbon fully supports all levels of automatic resizing, with buttons, galleries, groups and other layout panels altering their dimensions and internal layout dynamically (or even collapsing to popup form) in order to rearrange controls to best suit available screen space. Configuring this feature is straightforward and is a matter of setting a few properties and using the right layout containers.

Also included in SandRibbon are a selection of peripheral controls which, while not integral to the ribbon itself, are commonly seen on it. The ColorPicker control allows selection of a preconfigured list of colors and optionally graduations of those colors too. The RibbonComboBox control extends the platform ComboBox control with a ribbon theme that makes it fit in with galleries. The ToolBar control can be used anywhere in your application in a standalone capacity, as well as slotting into the Ribbon itself to provide quick access to common commands.

All the commonly-used functionality of the Office 2007 UI is made available for you to use with this product, and most of the less common functionality too. Customers who have used SandRibbon for WPF will find the API familiar. The visual constructs used are compatible with all other Silverlight controls, both built-in and third-party.

SandRibbon is a robust, production-ready toolkit that fully supports high DPI on any Silverlight environment. Your users can be assured of accessibility with generous keyboard directional navigation included in popups. Full right-to-left support means you can deploy your application into any locale in the world and be assured your users will get the best experience possible.

SandRibbon supports most of the presentation capabilities of the Office 2007 ribbon user interface. It presents these features in a developer-friendly package which means these advanced capabilities can be integrated into your application in minutes. If you cannot see a feature explained here, please try the evaluation version or contact support@componentsource.com to discuss your requirements.

Features:

Dynamic Resizing
Every group in the ribbon can have up to four distinct layouts defined. The default, "large" layout is what is configured at design-time and is the ideal layout of the controls in the group. Two further layouts, "medium" and "small" can also be defined. At the extreme, a "collapsed" layout is when the entire group becomes iconic, and the user must click it to reveal the group in its "large" state, popped up beneath the ribbon.

Of course the ribbon cannot automatically adjust your controls in a manner which is both pleasing to the eye and makes sense from a functionality standpoint. SandRibbon ships with two layout panels which adjust their behaviour according to the prevailing group layout. The controls within the panels, such as buttons, spinners and galleries, are also aware of prevailing group layout and change their appearance too.

This combination of controls and layout panels ensures that creating ribbon layouts that can do everything that the Office applications can is easy.

Popup Engine
Underpinning many of the features in SandRibbon is the popup engine, which was written from scratch to support every kind of control that could be thrown at it and be as accessible as possible within the limits of the Silverlight platform. Galleries, menus and collapsed groups are shown in popups, as is the application menu and entire ribbon tabs when the ribbon is minimized.

Popups are modal, in that you cannot interact with elements outside of the popup until the popup is dismissed. Animations and shadows are made use of to help popups jump out of the page and feel aesthetically pleasing. Directional keyboard navigation is built in, should users require it. The application popup has a special appearance and can host other application-specific content in its right-hand pane, where the child popups of any menu controls are also displayed.

Context popups are supported too. Despite the lack of right mouse button support in Silverlight, it is sometimes useful to be able to launch a popup from an arbitrary user interface element or at an arbitrary point.

Resizable Galleries
Galleries offer a scrollable container on to a collection of buttons. The precedent with galleries is for each button to show the result of using it, rather than a traditional, simple icon that illustrates its purpose in a way that has to be learned. Gallery buttons can contain text, an image or both.

The layout of items within a gallery is typically wrapped and buttons are all a fixed size. This enables gallery resizing, a feature that allows the user to grab the bottom of the popup and resize in either a vertical or horizontal and vertical direction. Items within the gallery flow appropriately for the space allowed.

An in-ribbon gallery is a special kind of gallery that displays its items within the ribbon itself instead of in a popup. Only when the user clicks the dropdown button is the full list of items shown, and again it can be resized if the developer allows it. In addition, extra items such as the menu on the right can be added to the popup associated with an in-ribbon gallery.

ToolBars and the QAT
SandRibbon ships with a ToolBar class that can be used both in a standalone state and as the Quick Access Toolbar when assigned to the ribbon. Although the use of toolbars in a ribbon-based application is discouraged, it makes sense if you have other docked windows that do not themselves have a ribbon control.

The quick access toolbar, as in Office, can be shown above or below the ribbon; its appearance changes depending upon what position is selected. When screen space is tight it moves obscured child controls into an area that becomes accessible with a popup. It also presents a menu allowing the user to change its position and to toggle the minimization state of the ribbon.

Contextual Tabs
There is often a need for certain commands or groups of commands to only be available when a certain state is achieved in your document. When large numbers of controls are involved they can be placed into a ribbon tab that is only visible when that state is achieved. With a very different presentation than normal tabs, contextual tabs are the best way of presenting such controls.

SandRibbon provides the ability to associate certain tabs with an editing context. Once associated those tabs are hidden until their editing context is activated, and when activated they are shown using special colors and other graphical hints. An example of an editing context is Picture Tools. It can contain one or more tabs, all of which are shown only when the application informs SandRibbon that the Picture Tools editing context should be activated. It is even possible to have more than one editing context activated at the same time.

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