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Summary

SandBar by Divelements

URLs: sandbar, divelements

Add Office and Visual Studio dockable toolbars and menus to your applications. SandBar is a powerful and lightweight toolbar and menuing library. It combines a rich and intuitive design time experience with a solid, extensible architecture and renderers that mimic Microsoft Office 2003, Office XP and Visual Studio 2005. Included are dockable toolbars, menus, statusbars, task panes and much more. The library includes full WYSIWYG designer support for menus and toolbars and a comprehensive API for extensive customisation and deep integration by your developers.

Features:

SandBar has a robust set of features, all geared to help the developer create the perfect toolbar/menuing system. Most of its features are highly customisable and extensible:

Toolbars

Can be standalone in any container or part of a SandBar layout to allow docking and floating

Can be docked at any orientation, allowing for vertical button layout

Support imagelists, direct icon assignment or direct image assignment

The user's chosen layout can easily be persisted to and restored from a file

Any control can be hosted on a toolbar by extending base classes

All text is fully localisable

Right-to-left layout is fully supported for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic

ContainerBars extend the toolbar to give the Office task pane look and feel

StatusBars extend the toolbar to give specialised statusbar appearance and functionality

Easy linking of toolbar items to menu items removes the need to write code to handle toolbar button activation

Automatic toolbar conversion can convert your standard .net toolbars to SandBar toolbars

In-situ editing of toolbar items at design time including drag-and-drop and clipboard support

Menuing

Supports smooth animations including slide, fade and unfold

Support imagelists, direct icon assignment or direct image assignment

Completely proprietary menu system allows docking, floating and even hosted controls

Any top-level menu item can be used as a context menu on any control

Optional automatic MDI window list functionality

Optional automatic menu merging functionality

Little-used items can be initially hidden until the user clicks a chevron button

Right-to-left layout is fully supported for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic

Shortcut pairs are supported for advanced editing operations (e.g. Ctrl+K, Ctrl-C)

Automatic menu conversion can convert your standard .net menus to SandBar menus

Advanced menu designers allow you to design and configure your menu system visually

Look and Feel

Pluggable renderer system allows complete control over drawing of all toolbar and menu items.

Includes renderers to mimic Office XP, Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005.

Layout Engine

SandBar includes a powerful layout engine which allows you to give your users maximum flexibility when customising your applications. SandBar uses this layout engine to power its various controls, including toolbars, menus, statusbars and containerbars. These controls can be docked to any location in your container or floated at any location on the screen. Docked bars can sit next to other bars and slide in to position automatically when the layout changes. They can optionally stretch to fill available space on their row.

As well as being movable, bars can also be torn off the sides of the form in to a floating state. They then stay hovering above your form, visible when the form is active, until the user drags them back in to a container or changes their position. While floating, a toolbar can be resized; items wrap intelligently to fit in the layout space available. Persisting the toolbar layouts configured by your users is made easy with two simple functions, which can optionally persist the visible states of all the buttons on the toolbar.

'Action Buttons' at the end of each toolbar provide access to any buttons that are hidden due to space constraints, and also allow the user to turn buttons on and off at will.

When short of space, buttons are either hidden and accessed via a 'chevron' that appears in the actions button on the end of a toolbar, or wrapped to the next line. Five different levels of importance can be applied to toolbar items, and those that are least important can be hidden first when space gets tight.

The SandBar menuing system can be heavily customised and extended by the developer. For instance, you may want a popup menu that looks different from standard menus in order to better present a specific set of options. An example of this is the dropdown colour selection tool in Microsoft Word, which shows many options on one row as well as an option to choose a custom colour. An example of writing a custom menu is provided with the SandBar demonstration application.

Look and Feel

There are three renderers included with SandBar; one that mimics Office 2003, one that mimics Office XP and one that mimics Visual Studio 2005. All of these renderers expose properties that allow you control over the colours they use as a base to draw with. The Office XP renderer lets you change the background and highlight colours, and the Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 renderers allow you to change the colours used to draw gradients and borders.

You can also inherit from these renderers or write your own from scratch to take complete control of the drawing process. Every part of the SandBar drawing process can be overridden and taken complete control of.

Designer Support

The designer support included with SandBar is unparalleled. Menu designers built from the ground up let you design complex menu systems visually, by expanding and collapsing them just as you would at run-time. ToolBar designers allow you to select and drag buttons from one location to another. You can even drag menu items from a menu on a menubar to a dropdown menu on a toolbar.

This level of designer integration will ensure you have a fully working, great looking application up and running in a matter of minutes, without even writing any code.

Localisation

All instances of English text in SandBar can be localised to any language.

SandBar is one of the only toolbar/menu libraries to support right-to-left menu layout for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Shown right is a SandBar layout mimicing the Arabic version of Microsoft Word with the Edit menu open.

Because the same advanced layout engine is shared between all bars, you can choose to make toolbars and statusbars right-to-left aware as well as just menus.

What's New in SandBar for Windows Forms 1.4.3

NEW: ShortcutDisplayString property on MenuButtonItem allows complete customization of the display string for a menu shortcut.

FIX: When maximizing an MDI parent the menubar could fail to be stretched along the entire toolbar container width.

FIX: Language strings updated when toolbars are already created are correctly pushed out.

FIX: Repeatedly minimizing and restoring a form with floating toolbars/menubars could result in them being hidden.

FIX: ControlContainerItem now scales the MinimumControlWidth property in line with other form scaling.

FIX: Restoring layout would not correctly restore the width of floating toolbars if they had been resized.

FIX: Top-level menu mnemonics were processed before standard .net mnemonics on the active MDI child.

Add Office and Visual Studio dockable toolbars and menus to your applications.

Pricing: SandBar 1.4.3 - includes 1 year free product updates and unlimited email support 1 Developer License, SandBar 1.4.3 - includes 1 year free product updates and unlimited email support 2-3 Developer License (Price per Developer, Minimum quantity 2), SandBar 1.4.3 - includes 1 year free product updates and unlimited email support 4-7 Developer License (Price per Developer, Minimum quantity 4), SandBar 1.4.3 - includes 1 year free product updates and unlimited email support 8 Developer License or above (Price per Developer, Minimum quantity 8), SandBar 1.4.3 - includes 1 year free product updates and unlimited email support Unlimited Site License (Allows Unlimited Developers at a Single Physical Address), SandBar - Support Renewal 1 Developer Support Renewal License, SandBar - Support Renewal 2-3 Developer Support Renewal License (Price per Developer, Minimum quantity 2), SandBar - Support Renewal 4-7 Developer Support Renewal License (Price per Developer, Minimum quantity 4), SandBar - Support Renewal 8 Developer or above Support Renewal License (Price per Developer, Minimum quantity 8), SandBar - Support Renewal Unlimited Site Support Renewal License (Allows Unlimited Developers at a Single Physical Address)

Evals & Downloads: Browse the SandBar Screenshot Gallery, Read the SandBar help file, Read the Divelements EULA, Download the SandBar V1.4 evaluation for VS 2003 on to your computer - Expires after 30 days, Download the SandBar 1.4.3 evaluation for VS 2005 on to your computer - Expires after 30 days

Operating System for Deployment: Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows 98

Architecture of Product: 32Bit, 64Bit

Product Type: Component

Component Type: .NET WinForms, .NET Class, 100% Managed Code

Built Using: Visual C# .NET

Compatible Containers: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft Visual Basic 2008, Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003, Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft Visual C++ 2008, Microsoft Visual C++ 2005, Microsoft Visual C++ .NET 2003, Microsoft Visual C++ .NET, Microsoft Visual C# 2008, Microsoft Visual C# 2005, Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003, Microsoft Visual C# .NET, .NET Framework 3.5, .NET Framework 3.0, .NET Framework 2.0, .NET Framework 1.1, .NET Framework 1.0

Keywords: office toolbar dockable menu xp SandBar Sand Bar

Toolbar tool bar tool-bar Toolbars Menu Menus Ribbon Ribbonbar

Part numbers: PC-516204-459540 516204-459540 PC-516204-459542 516204-459542 PC-516204-459544 516204-459544 PC-516204-459548 516204-459548 PC-516204-459556 516204-459556 PC-516204-459546 516204-459546 PC-516204-459550 516204-459550 PC-516204-459552 516204-459552 PC-516204-459554 516204-459554 PC-516204-459558 516204-459558