I was wondering if, in a future release of your WinForms suite, you will add the option of a glass RibbonBar component. I would love it if your already-excellent RibbonBar control could be improved so that it looked more like the Office RibbonBar. When Word in not maximized, for example, the window is bordered by glass, and the quick access toolbar, window title, and menu button are all drawn on glass instead of your current solution (on an opaque bar). I've seen many other component vendors offering this functionality, and I would love it if you would consider implementing this! Is there any way this could happen in your next release?
Thank you very much!
-UIDev
5 Answers, 1 is accepted
Thank you for your request.
We actually support transparency under Vista for our Shaped Form and this support is included in our latest release. To enable transparency under Vista, simply set the EnableCompositionOnVista property of the ShapedForm to true.
There is a catch, however, and it is that some controls cannot paint correctly on Vista when the form is blurred. This is a limitation of Vista UI, not of our framework. Basically, a control's text in a form with Aero effect will be blurred as well, regardless the foreground color. This behavior has to be overridden manually, and luckily there are some workarounds available. For most controls it is enough to enable compatible text rendering by calling Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault in your Program.cs file:
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(true);
The problem will remain with the TextBox however, until you override the default drawing behavior of the control, which in turn can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Here are some resources which talk about this problem:
This is the best we can offer you at this time. We have not decided whether we will provide a new painting mechanism for Vista Aero, but chances are slim that we will, at least not in the coming year. We will need to provide a totally new painting framework from scratch, which 1) is a bit out of the scope of the WinForms controls, and 2) is very hard to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.
I am sorry if this reply is somewhat disappointing. I hope that our efforts will help you bring Aero experience to your customers.
Your comments are welcome.
Kind regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team
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Thanks for your quick and thorough response! I changed the EnableCompositionOnVista property to true on my ShapedForm. However, I am using VB.NET in my current application, so I don't have a Program.cs file. Do you know how I could create something similar in VB.NET so I can call Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault? Without setting this, the result I got in my application is shown here: http://tiny.pl/pwbn. It looks a lot different than Word! Is the Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault necessary for the RibbonBar to display Aero Glass properly (ignoring the text, but the actual title bar).
Thanks!-UIdev
Setting this property of RadRibbonBar to true does not affect the style of the title bar at this time. Currently, the Vista Aero style is not available on RadRibbonbar and RadTitlebar.
We are in the process of looking for a solution to this issue.
Please contact us again if further questions arise.
Regards,
Peter
the Telerik team
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Thank you for writing.
We are working on the issue. With Q1 2008 we released a new control called RadForm that supports Windows Aero.
This is the first step in the major RibbonBar refactoring that will include RadRibbonBar form with full Glass support.
All the best,
Peter
the Telerik team
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