Why should I use a RibbonWindow?

RibbonWindow is a subclass of the regular WPF Window that provides additional services to be able to integrate Ribbon components with the Window Chrome. To demonstrate this use the sample application from the previous post.

 

 

 

• Right-click the Format Painter button within the Clipboard Group
• Choose Add to QuickAccessToolBar option
• Notice that the Button shows in the title row for the Window.

 

 

 

 

This was made possible by the use of RibbonWindow. Under the covers, RibbonWindow uses the Chrome library to achieve this. However, it isn’t mandatory to use a RibbonWindow to host the Ribbon UI. If a regular WPF Window is used instead all of the same functionality is available barring the integration with the Window Chrome. So the same Ribbon UI would appear as below.

 

 

 

Read next post to learn about rich RibbonToolTips.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2010
  This is all good stuff, however it seem's that when you maximise a ribbon window the title background turns almost black.  This makes it quite hard to read the title text, which is black.

• Anonymous
  August 05, 2010
  The window context menu also does not pop-up in the correct location when maximized.  It pops up where it would if the window were un-maximized. The WPF Toolkit was available under MSPL, so I could compile a custom version with some crucial bugfixes.  Can't do that with this ribbon.  "Ribbon source code is available for reference purposes only."

• Anonymous
  August 05, 2010
  @Nemmins: I am unable to reproduce the symptoms you describe. I have tried this on Window 7 as well on Windows Server 2008 R2 OSes. Would you please send over a screenshot of the buggy behavior and also clarify what OS and .Net version you are using? Thanks in advance. @Tom: You have identified a bug in our library. This issue is reproducable when you target .Net 4.0 only. It does not exist when targetting .Net 3.5. I have blogged about this issue and a workaround for it blogs.msdn.com/.../systemmenu-does-not-show-correctly-when-ribbon-application-is-run-against-net-4-0.aspx. Once again thanks for reporting this issue and we look forward to further feedback from you.

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2010
  I'm using Vista sp2 with .net 4.  Where should I send the screenshot? Thanks.

• Anonymous
  September 01, 2010
  @Nemmins: Thanks for sending the screenshot. I believe we understand the issue and will look to mitigate this soon. @Tom: As for your question about the servicing for this library, we plan to release an update in the next couple months. And we have been combing through the issues reported on http://wpf.codeplex.com. The advice though is to report issues via http://connect.microsoft.com