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My main form embeds a ribbon and use the style manager. When the application is maximised and another window is floating on top of it (say, firefox, or MSN messenger) that is not full-screen, clicking my form title bar does not bring my application to the front. Clicking on any visible ribbon control does so however (or any of my other controls on the form). This is generally accepted behavior for forms I think.

Thanks.

Sorry for the stupid question... But how do you put an image on the toggle button? Thanks Alot!

-Andrew

Hi,

Been using the control for a week now and I absolutely love it - I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble persuading my manager to part with some cash for it either. Anyway, I’m getting a small graphics glitch on toggle buttons when they are disabled. I have one for instance that is on a panel (on the ribbon), inside a group box - the panel and group are enabled but the button itself isn’t. Its being displayed with small icon and text (its okay with just small icon). The button itself has a really blocky border as if the v-scale of its skin bitmap is out of whack (if its using a bitmap for its skin I don’t know). Looks great when its enabled, but awful when disabled. I can send some little screenies if you give me an address.

Thanks

Our company develops client-server Windows applications.
We bought and use numerous Active-X controls with our development environment. We use such controls as EasyMail 5.0 ActiveX controls to name one.
We do not use VS 2005 as Dev tools, we simply make direct calls to the controls and this works great. We develop used Progress Software OpenEdge environment.

Your Ribbon control is of great interest to us.
Since other activeX control such as EasyMail works for us, do you think your Ribbon controls would also work?

Thanks
G Larouche
R&D Manager

hi there,

i’m still investigating with this controls, i need to do a POS program. As the employee can scan with a barcode reader or type directly in (they won’t use mouse much in this program module), i’m force to have a textbox which always got the focus. Before for doing this, i set the tabstop to false for every controls except my textbox. I tried the same with ribbon but no luck, any idea how to do this ?

regards

pascal

If you place our text box on a form on into any other container but the ribbon and set tab stops like you described, you should get what you expect. In the case of ribbon, the text box must lost focus when the user presses Enter or Escape so the user can return to the main application workspace. Because of that it would not probably be a good idea to put such a special always-focused text box into the ribbon. Please let us know your point of view.

i’d have prefered to put the textbox on the ribbon to spare some horizontal space, but it seems not possible after your explaination :<

the problem is the Enter or Escape key, i don’t see why there’s no way to override this behavior (this part of the program is keyboard driven only), i’ve specialised the textbox believing that i can override the processcmdkey, but it seems not even to be called anymore :s what do you think ?

thanks in advance

pascal



public class myTextbox:Elegant.Ui.TextBox
    {

        protected override bool ProcessCmdKey(ref System.Windows.Forms.Message msg, System.Windows.Forms.Keys keyData)
        {
            if(keyData==System.Windows.Forms.Keys.Return)
                return true;
            
            return base.ProcessCmdKey(ref msg, keyData);
        }
    }

There is no problem with adding this feature but we can only add it in the next version (v.1.2).

Great !!! that’d be awesome :)) any idea when the next version will be available ?

Hi there,

me again :) i checked the doc, and it says

"Figure 6 Custom non-client area of the form window

This is achieved with a skin component (Frame Skinner) (see Figure 7). You can also customize the frame’s skin or even implement the non-client area in your own custom way, for example, by adding additional controls to the title bar."

i checked the samples and the formskiner class , and i don’t see how i can add customs controls in the non client area (like the save or refresh button in word97)

thanks in advance

Yes, we designed the form frame component in the way that allows the developer to customize different aspects of the non-client area. Still, this customization is not so easy like using the VS form designer. We will certainly write an article about how to do that but before we need to perform some refactoring to make the form frame component completely compatible with Vista DWM.

Another part of the issue is what do you want to achieve. the standard Microsoft Ribbon UI specification declares several parts that can be hosted in the non-client area: application button, quick access toolbar (will be added in v.1.2), contextual tab groups, and minimize/maximize/close buttons. If you have some ideas about form frame elements, please tell us so we can consider if we can add it to Elegant Ribbon.

great to hear that a sample is on the go ;)

about adding controls in the non client area, i was thinking about a toolbar.

Would it be possible in the future to add the button class as context independant controls ?

regards

pascal

Hello there,

i’m starting to evaluate this great looking component. Something that i didn’t figured it out is how can i set the CurrentTabPageIndex ? so i’m switching the tab by code on event. Also how can i get the index of the current tab ? i noticed the event "CurrentTabPageChanged" but nothing give me the index

thanks in advance

Found it :)

ribbon.CurrentTabPage

Hi,

Just downloaded your ribbon and trying to use it for the first time. I want to do a really simple thing: change the colour scheme from office blue to office black. I can find any properties on the window object or the ribbon itself for this. Can you point me in the right direction to do this please?

Thankyou


Robin

Thank you for the interesting question. We have just added a FAQ article that should answer it.

Thanks for the information on the new version. It’s 8 days since you posted this. Is the version close and will you advise me when it’s ready. I am not desperate for it but simply would like to include the fix as soon as possible as my application is in the QA stage.

Hey

How do you make the tab headers appear golden/highlighted. It’s something I’d like to do to one of my tabs, as seen in:

http://www.prof-uis.com/img/elegantribbon/samples/elegant_ui_commands_sample.png

That effect isn’t the ’current tab’ effect, so I’m wondering what I have to do to go gold? :)

XP MCE, VS 2005

Tab index is not firing. Even the MouseDown event is not firing.

Steps to recreate:

Add ribbon to form add second tab. Add this code to form code

Private Sub Ribbon1_MouseDown(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs) Handles Ribbon1.MouseDown
If e.Button = Windows.Forms.MouseButtons.Left Then
MsgBox("Mouse Down Event!")
End If
End Sub

You cannot receive the MouseDown event from the Ribbon because it is completely covered by its child controls. Please let us know what is the reason you want to handle this event? And what do you mean by Tab index is not firing?

I get what you’re saying, but when you click a tab, the Ribbon1_TabIndexChanged() event is not firing, so in an attempt to trap that in the mouseDown event of the ribbon, it’s not firing either.

Rick

Thank you for clarifying your question. Actually the System.Windows.Forms.Control.TabIndexChanged event has nothing to do with Elegant Ribbon. It is a standard event that occurs when the tab index property of the control changes. If you want to track when current tab page in the Ribbon changes, you can use the Elegant.Ribbon.CurrentTabPageChanged event.

Will the next iteration of Ribbon.UI have support for dropdown combo boxes? I need to enumerate a fonts list but can’t do it without the dropdown combo box.

So far I am pleased with its performance.

Hey,

Quick question. I’ve set up a few screen tips on some menu items on the ribbon, but when I hover over those items the tips do not shot, and I’ve waited quite a while for it. Is there some piece of trigger code I’m missing or a variable I need to set to allow the screentips to show?

We have tested screen tips over menu items both on Windows XP and Vista and everything works fine. You can check this using Elegant Ribbon Ui sample. If you set the mouse pointer over Some Action in the Text Box menu (Home tab), you should see the screentip aproximately in 1 second.

To set up the screen tip for any control, simply fill the properties of the Control.ScreenTip object (Caption, Text, Image). If the problem persists, please send us a project illustrating this issue so we can check this.

I’m just doing this via the Visual Studio 2005 designer, under the Behavior/Screen-Tip section I’m populating the properties for caption, text and image and when I use the "Click ... to preview" button I’m able to see a nice preview in a popup window. Loading the application and hovering over it yields nothing though.

Potential bug 1: Re-ordering groups via the VS 2005 designer doesnt seem to allow me to re-arrange groups.
Potential bug 2: Moving/Repositioning screentip preview window causes screentip to disappear.
Small issue: Preview window always appears on leftmost monitor of desktop, regardless of the monitor that VS is placed on. Does not remember when it is repositioned.

I’m not doing anything fancy. Interestingly I can’t seem to invoke your screentips via the example programs either (I tried as many of the controls as I could, including ones like Paste which I confirmed in-code as having a screentip specified). My guess is that this is either an issue with RTM Vista, or some problem with multi-display configurations to do with screen coordinatees selection code for rendering (i.e. The tip is rendering, but somewhere offscreen).

We have sent you a zip with updated binaries. All the bugs are now fixed. Re-ordering groups via the VS 2005 designer was not implemented earlier but now is available. Thank you for reporting the problems. We appreciate your help.

I have the same problem or similar problem with screentips. I’m using Windows Vista Ultimate but screentips do not show - either on my application (I have filled in the Screentips fields and the preview looks fine) or on the sample Elegant Ribbon application including on the Textbox | Some Action example you referred to with the original developer who reported this problem. Can I also acquire the fix you refer to asap. Thanks, Doug

Test Machine: Windows Vista x86 Ultimate (RTM), .NET Framework 2.0 & 3.0, VS 2005 Pro

Noticable bottom border issue where it appears like the 1px outer border colour appears to be drawn twice, causing (in the default blue skin), a noticable disconnected line at the bottom edge of the window.

Hello,

I’ve noticed that when I set IsMDIContainer on a Windows.Form instance, that the application button and custom headers do not seem to position themselves correctly, causing graphical corruption on the left. Am I doing something wrong here?

-Steve Gray

Hi,

I do not have many references about working examples of ribbon enabled applications, because there are not many yet. But is there a merging of ribbon contents in a MDI application, somewhere? Or is MDI a thing from the past? Or does Elegant Ribbon simply not support MDI merging? Do I make my point clear?

Didi

Of course, it is up to you if you will be using MDI in your application or not. You can use Elegant Ribbon with MDI. As for the merging issue, we think that for ribbon UI applications it would be more natural to use contextual tabs (color highlighted tabs that are hidden or closed depending on particular context conditions) in pair with commands. This doesn’t mean we do not plan to implement MDI merging in the future. We simply consider it a lower priority task at the moment.

We would suggest that you hide/show particular ribbon tabs when a child form gets visible/hidden. Using commands should help you avoid hard dependency between child MDI forms and the main form ribbon.

What about renaming "Pressed" or adding a Boolean called "Checked", so you would be able to use a GroupBox with ToggleButtons.

It is not completely clear what you mean. It seems you want to have ToggleButtons grouped into some kind of "radio groups" (like radio buttons), where only one toggle button can be pressed at one time. It is a good request indeed. In any case, we will add this feature to the library as soon as possible. If you meant something different, please let us know.

That’s what I meant.
Thank you.