XtraBars Suite - Toolbar-Menu & Docking System for Visual Studio .NET!

XtraBars Suite

Toolbars

Build any number of toolbars either on a form or on a user control. Toolbars produced by the XtraBars Suite have the same behavior as bars in Microsoft Office applications. This includes:

Docking toolbars to any container's edge.
Making toolbars float.
Arranging bars located at a container's edge across several rows, where each row can hold several toolbars.

All these features are available to you and your end-users without having to enable any options, set any properties or write any code! Just drag your toolbar to any location either at design or at runtime. Additionally, when using XtraBars, your application's end users will be able to create their own toolbars and populate them with buttons - just as they can with Microsoft Office!

XtraBars gives you complete control over the appearance and behavior of each toolbar.

Main Menus

As you can imagine, the XtraBars Suite gives you the ability to create application menus with ease. In fact, creating a menu and populating it with items is nearly identical to creating toolbars and their items. The only difference between a bar and a menu is that the BarManager component which controls the functionality of bars, knows which of your toolbars is the main menu and so it can force that bar to behave appropriately based on the circumstance - the main menu will obtain focus when pressing the ALT key, it cannot be removed by end users, etc.

If you have a project in progress, you don't have to reconstruct your standard MainMenu to our main menu - we have already done all the hard work for you! Just place the BarManager onto your form and choose the Import From MainMenu item from its context menu. It's that easy.

Status Bars

Just like main menus, status bars are the same as toolbars and can also be created with a single click. Similar to main menus, the BarManager knows which of your bars represents a status bar and ensures that it behaves appropriately. Status bars have a special painting mechanism and are always docked to the container's bottom edge so that no other control/bar can be positioned lower than the status bar.

Context Menus

Context (Popup) menus are represented by a separate component, but are also bound to and controlled by a BarManager. Of course, we have provided the same customization mechanism for context menus as that of any other bar you can create.

Once a context menu has been created, you can bind it to any control on the same form or user control using a dynamically generated property.

Dock Windows

The XtraBars Suite allows you to create a user interface similar to that found in MicrosoftŽ Visual Studio .NET via its the docking windows functionality. This capability is as easy to use as other features available to you in the the XtraBars - only a single click is needed to create a fully functional dock window. Features provided by dock windows include:

Automatic docking to any container's edge;
Floating state support;
The ability to create tabbed windows;
Content customization just by placing any Windows Forms controls onto dock windows in the same manner as on standard forms;
Responding to mouse actions just like Visual Studio's dock windows do;
Behavior and appearance options for each individual dock window.

XtraBars Suite Main Menu

XtraBars Suite is electronically deliverd.