XtraBars Suite

What's new in XtraBars Suite v2011 vol 1?

• New BackstageView Control for Ribbon - DXperience v2011 vol 1 ships with the DevExpress BackstageView Control – allowing you to create two types of items: a standard item and a tab item.
• Ribbon Color Schemes  - The Ribbon control supports multiple color schemes which affect the appearance of the Application Button and BackStageView Control (when used as a menu within the Ribbon).
• New MacOffice Paint Syle for Ribbon - Microsoft’s new MacOffice Ribbon Style can now be emulated using the DevExpress WinForms Ribbon Control.
• New Ribbon Mini Toolbar - If you have used the latest Microsoft Office applications, you may have noticed a small context-aware floating toolbar fade in when text or some other object is selected with the mouse. The toolbar is aware of the mouse cursor’s position: it will gradually fade out if you move the mouse cursor away. DevExpress have now incorporated this behavior into the new Ribbon Mini Toolbar, a floating toolbar that will allow you to display context-specific commands in your applications.
• New Document Manager - DevExpress have developed the new WinForms Document Manager component to help improve the tabbed user interface in your MDI applications. It includes numerous benefits when compared with the older XtraTabbedMdiManager.
• Alert Control - New Animation Effects - The newest version of the DevExpress WinForms Alert Control ships with four more animation effects.

What's new in XtraBars Suite v2010 vol 2?

• Standalone Gallery Control - The new WinForms Gallery Control allows you to create a photo viewer or simply display a collection of images within your application - It is a scrollable control that can display images with the option of categorizing them into groups. The Gallery Control's default orientation is vertical - items are arranged across one or more columns. To arrange items in rows, you can set the control's orientation to horizontal. For example, this allows you to implement a scrollable horizontal strip of images.
• Tabbed MDI Manager - Document Selector - The Document Selector allows you to switch between tab pages much like Microsoft Visual Studio. Press CTRL+TAB or CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to invoke the Document Selector.
• Tabbed MDI Manager - Show Tab Contents While Dragging - DXperience v2010 vol 2 improves the tab dragging capabilities within the XtraTabbedMDIManager. When you drag a tab outside the header region, a preview of the tab is displayed. Dragging tabs within the header region is also more intuitive (blue hints are displayed to help a user visualize window position when dropped).
• Add Skin Chooser to Your Application - With this release, DevExpress have introduced a new SkinHelper class that allows you to incorporate straightforward skin “switching” to your application. By calling a single method, you can populate a menu or Ribbon gallery with all available DevExpress skins - No additional code is required. When an end-user selects a skin from this menu/Ribbon gallery, the skin is automatically applied to all DevExpress controls on your form (via the Default Look And Feel mechanism).

What's new in XtraBars Suite v2010 vol 1?

• Full Support for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework Client Profile

What’s new in XtraBars Suite? - The XtraBars Suite allows you to build alert windows similar to those used by Microsoft Outlook to indicate that you have new mail in your inbox.

Key features include:

• Automatic fade in and fade out effects.
• Full support for the DevExpress Application Skinning (Theme) engine.
• Built-in Pin and Close buttons that allow end-users to keep an alert window on screen or close it.
• Ability to associate a popup menu with alert windows.
• Custom buttons at the bottom of alert windows.
• Formatting alert windows' text and captions using HTML tags.
• Customizable position of alert windows.
• Sticking alert windows to the screen edges.
• Quick response to clicking an alert window's text by handling an event.

What’s new in XtraBars Suite v2008 vol 2?

• Collapsible Toolbars -Microsoft Office applications provide a way to hide toolbars and make them visible again. This functionality was replicated in the XtraBars Suite so that end-user experience can mimic that of Microsoft Office. Though the Microsoft Office approach seems simple enough, the XtraBars Suite now provides a more elegant solution in v2008 vol 2. Prior to this release and like in Microsoft Office, you had to right-click a toolbar then locate its name within the context menu and uncheck the menu item. From this point forward, end-users can simply double-click the toolbar's thumb - and by doing so, all toolbar items are hidden and thus the toolbar is minimized. Another double-click expands the toolbar to its previous state. Both expand and collapse operations are executed with a sliding animation effect.
• Icons in Ribbon Tabs - In order to make Ribbon tabs more recognizable by end-users, you can now display icons within them.

What’s new in XtraBars Suite v2008 vol 1?

Close Buttons in Tabs when using XtraTabbedMdiManager - With this new feature, you can easily emulate popular internet browser interfaces.

What's new in XtraBars v2007 vol 3?

Standalone Toolbars - You can now place toolbars at any location within a form.

Ribbon Enhancements - Similar to toolbars and menus, the RibbonControl supports MDI merging. This allows you to save working space by automatically moving bar commands from a child form to the main form when maximizing a child. You don't have to write any code to enable this feature. Simply specify when merging should take place - when the main form is activated or when it's maximized.

Customizable Height for Embedded Editors - The RibbonControl was previously optimized to display single-line editors, which made it hard to display memo data, images and radio buttons. With this release, you can explicitly set an editor's height. Thus you can make an editor use the entire vertical space provided by the RibbonControl.

Displaying Bar Commands to the Right of Tab Headers - Your application's UI can now mimic Microsoft Office more effectively by embedding controls into the tab header area. There are no restrictions on embedded control type - it can be a help button, a search string editor or anything else your business requirements dictate.

Transparent Background for In-place Editors - You can now freely use check boxes, track bars and radio groups within ribbons. A white background will not be displayed when you move focus to these editors.

New Navigation Capabilities - Implemented two new navigation features so that you can provide the same end-user experience as that found in Microsoft Office. You can now change the active tab by scrolling the mouse wheel when the Ribbon is hot-tracked. If tab headers or commands don't fit into the parent window horizontally, scroll buttons are displayed so that all commands remain accessible.

What's new in XtraBars v2007 vol 2?

• Contextual Tabs in Ribbon - All tabs within the Ribbon are now grouped into categories - at least one default category contains permanently visible tabs. You can also create any number of context-dependent categories. Tabs contained in these categories can be made visible on demand, when required by the current context.
• Application Menu Improvements - You can now populate the Application Menu's right pane and footer with any control. For instance, you can emulate the recent document list and footer buttons available in Microsoft Office.
• Enhanced Design-Time Experience - Many enhancements have been made so that you can set up the Ribbon control directly on your form. You will no longer need the Ribbon Designer dialog to customize sub-menus and galleries. With this new design-time extensions, you can open the Application Menu, dropdown menus and galleries to access any element and its properties. You will also be able to customize these containers by adding or removing elements via context menus.
• Another significant new feature is the complete support for drag and drop operations. You will now be able to drag elements between tab groups, from the Ribbon to the Application Menu, from the Application Menu to the Status Bar, etc. You can also drag entire groups between tabs.

With the XtraBars Suite you can build:

• Ribbon - The XtraBars Suite includes several components allowing you to build Ribbon interfaces similar to those found in Microsoft Office 2007
• Traditional Toolbar/Menu Systems - With the XtraBars Suite you can easily emulate toolbar/menu systems like those found in Microsoft Office 2003 (or earlier).
• Dock Windows - The XtraBars Suite allows you to create a user interface similar to that found in Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET (dockable windows)
• Tabbed MDI Interfaces - Simply drop the XtraTabbedMdiManager component onto the MDI container form. MDI children will be automatically arranged into tabs, end-users will be able to switch between tabs using standard shortcuts, rearrange documents by dragging tabs, close and navigate documents using built-in buttons
• Popup Menus - The XtraBars Suite allows you to create multi-purpose popup menus. These menus can be used as dropdown lists for toolbar or ribbon buttons. As you might expect, you can also bind popup menus to any Windows control on a form

Ribbon Features

• Ribbon Elements - All elements required by the Microsoft Office 2007 UI License are supported
• Layout Adaptation - The Ribbon implementation doesn't simply mimic appearance, it also provides out-of-the-box layout adaptation capabilities. If you narrow a window, the ribbon's content will automatically be compressed by changing large to smaller images, hiding item text, moving buttons into dropdown windows, etc. If you widen the window, the layout will be restored to its initial state
• Galleries - There is a special item type that allows you to create Galleries - an easy and elegant way to organize lengthy option lists
• Contextual Tabs in Ribbon - All tabs within the Ribbon are grouped into categories - at least one default category contains permanently visible tabs. You can also create any number of context-dependent categories. Tabs contained in these categories can be made visible on demand, when required by the current context
• Application Menu - Our RibbonControl allows you to create an application menu similar to that found in Microsoft Office applications
• Key Tip Support - Our Ribbon implementation fully supports Key tips. If an end-user presses the ALT or F10 key, small tooltips showing keyboard shortcuts are displayed over Ribbon items
• Advanced Tooltips - The RibbonControl supports "super tooltips". The SuperTip property has been added to the RibbonPageGroup and BarItem classes, enabling an advanced tooltips display for group buttons and all kinds of bar items. Using this property, you can easily specify header, footer and content text and also specify which images to display in each section
• Fade Animation - Animated hot-track effects are now supported in our .NET Windows Forms products. When end-users hover Ribbon elements, command buttons, check boxes, editor buttons or main menu items, these elements are highlighted using an animated fade effect. Fade animation is also used to restore an element's original state when the mouse pointer leaves this element

Elements you can use in Ribbon, Toolbars and Menus

• Push or check buttons
• Buttons with dropdown windows
• Buttons with dropdown menus
• Sub menus
• Static text
• Toolbar lists that allows end users to show and hide toolbars
• An MDI window list that allows you to invoke any of the opened MDI child windows
• A Link container item that can hold a set of any other elements allowing you to reuse the same collection of elements or to construct lists similar to the Internet Explorers Favorites list
• List items that make customization easy, via a string list
• Embedded editors 20 editors from the XtraEditors Library can be embedded into toolbars and menus from text editors to color and font pickers

Appearance Customization

• Toolbars, menus and dock windows can be painted in Office 2000 (Flat), Office XP (UltraFlat), Office 2003 style or using the currently applied system theme
• The XtraBars Suite fully supports Skins technology which means elements are constructed from a set of bitmaps. This allows you to provide an XP look and feel to previous operating systems and build your own unique look and feels. With XtraBars, you get over10 built-in skins including Office 2007 paint styles
• The previous two benefits are made possible since all the included controls support the shared painting library. With this library, you have centralized control over the look and feel of all controls. You can change the paint style of all the controls by changing just a single property
• The XtraBars Suite supports background images and alpha blending

Bar and Menu features:

• 5 menu animation effects are available
• A popup overflow panel is available if the forms width is too small to completely display all the toolbar items
• Menus can display only the most recently used items like in Microsoft Office
• Full support for MDI Applications including menu merging and main menu buttons to control MDI child windows
• Toolbars can occupy multiple lines
• Editor items can turn into buttons that invoke dialogs when a toolbar is vertically oriented just like the font editor item in Microsoft Office toolbars

Dock Window main features:

• Auto-hide functionality
• Dock windows can reside within a tab container
• Neighboring dock windows can reside within a split container. This means that you can maximize a window and the other neighboring windows are minimized

End-user Experience - The XtraBars Suite offers out-of-the-box end-user customization mechanisms just like those found in Microsoft Office. These mechanisms include:

• Ribbon's Quick Access Toolbar is Fully Supported
• Ribbon Minimization - To use form space more efficiently, end-users can temporarily minimize a Ribbon to leave only its page headers visible. For this purpose, they can double-click a page header or select the appropriate context menu item. The same actions can be used to restore the Ribbon state
• An Add or Remove Buttons dropdown in each bar
• The visibility of Toolbars can be customized using a context menu invoked by right-clicking bars
• Customization dialog just like in Microsoft Office
• Context menus for each item when the Customization dialog is active
• Hot customization end users can reorder and copy items using drag and drop while the ALT key is pressed

Design-time Experience

• On-form Ribbon Creation and Customization - When you build a Ribbon, you don't have to invoke a designer dialog each time you need to add or delete Ribbon elements or when you need to access their settings. Ribbon content customization can be done directly on the form by using two very simple context menus. If you need to access an object's settings, simply click that object and modify it using the Properties window
• On-form Toolbar/Menu Creation and Customization - The XtraBars Suite allows you to add and customize your bars directly on the form - without the need for designer dialogs. Once you place a BarManager component onto a form, the main menu, the status bar and a toolbar are automatically created for you. You can then add any number of toolbars by using the BarManager's Smart Tag or context menu
• Almost all customization approaches from the End-User Experience section are available at design-time
• Convenient Designer dialogs to customize ribbons, bars and dock windows are included

Miscellaneous

• You can save and restore the layout of toolbars and dock windows via several storage medias
• You can enable automatic saving restoring of the layout when closing and opening applications, respectively
• The XtraBars Suite fully supports localization