WinForms Menu Controls, Windows Forms Office Menu Components

Overview

RadControls for Windows Forms include an array of flexible menuing options to help you structure user choices within your application: Telerik Menu enables you to implement attractive navigation systems, comprised of classic or Office 2007-style menus. The same RadMenu functionality is available anywhere in the form using Telerik ContextMenu. RadApplicationMenu is the Telerik counterpart of the "application menu" that displays controls used to perform actions on entire documents and forms, such as Save and Print.

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Features

RadMenu

The Telerik Menu for Windows Forms enables you to implement attractive navigation systems, comprised of classic or Office 2007-style menus. Based on the Telerik Presentation Framework, the component gives you full control over item appearance, orientation, and text-wrapping, while allowing you to easily nest checkboxes, images, or any other controls in design-time.
In addition to the common features, supported by all Telerik menus, RadMenu supports Horizontal or Vertical Menu orientation, giving you extra flexibility when creating your application. When Orientation is set, its value determines the flow of the root group as well.
Telerik Windows Forms Menu supports menu-merging, which allows you to merge menu items or whole menus from a child form into the menus of the parent form when working with a multiple-document interface (MDI) application. The control automatically discovers that it is placed in a child MDI form: when the child form is maximized, Telerik Menu automatically merges its items to the menu in the parent form; when a child form is restored/minimized, the parent and child menu states are restored.

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RadApplicationMenu

ApplicationMenu for Windows Forms is the Telerik counterpart of the "application menu" that displays controls used to perform actions on entire documents, forms, and applications, such as Save and Print. It resembles the Office 2007 Menu button, which first appeared in the Microsoft Office 2007 RibbonBar.
Telerik ApplicationMenu is essentially a DropDownButton and has many of the same properties and design time interface as a Telerik Menu, i.e. same Smart Tag items, RadItem Collection Editor and the same RadItem types that may be added to the collection, making it easy and familiar to work with. It supports all common features of Telerik menus, including adding/removing items at run time, multiline text support, themes, etc.

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RadContextMenu and RadContextMenuManager

A content-sensitive context menu provides extra usability and richness to any application and it is available anywhere on the form by using Telerik ContextMenu. Context menus can be associated with specific controls or popped up programmatically at any X/Y location by using Telerik ContextMenuManager. Just like all Telerik menus, RadContextMenu supports design time and run time customization, theme support, and nested controls.

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Multiline Text and Image Support

All Telerik Menus supports multiline text in its items, giving you the ability to display text on several lines, rather than truncating long text. This is achieved through a label which the Windows Forms Menus use for its text field.
Images and text can be displayed on menu items as well, giving you full control over the menu's look and feel. You can customize the image-text relation by setting the TextImageRelation property. Possible values are: Overlay, ImageAboveText, TextAboveImage, TextBeforeImage, and ImageBeforeText.

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Support for Nested Controls

You can nest any Telerik Control or custom element within the menus. This feature gives you enormous flexibility in building functionality into your applications, and allows you to create complex custom user interfaces featuring text boxes, combo boxes, or other custom elements within the menu area.

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Checked/Unchecked/Disabled Menu Items

Using the powerful API of Windows Forms Menus you can have Checked, Unchecked, Disabled, or regular menu items, covering all common menu scenarios.

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Add/Remove Items at Run-time

With Telerik Windows Forms Menu you can Add and Remove items programmatically at run-time. When adding new items, they are appended to the existing items in the same menu using the Add(Item) method. Removing items hides them from the menu.

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Full Keyboard Support

Telerik Windows Forms Menus deliver convenience with full support for Shortcuts, Accelerator Keys, and Arrow-key navigation.
Telerik Menu for example, can be assigned shortcuts through the Shortcuts component - the base of the whole shortcuts system implemented for the descendants of RadControl and RadItem. The component serializes InputBinding objects as a collection. Every InputBinding object binds keyboard shortcut used for activation, a valid Command instance, and a command context which is the object that will be the target of the command's execution.

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Extensive VS.NET Design-time Support
Telerik Menus provide rich design-time support functionality making customizations and configurations very easy. Some of the key capabilities are:
- Easy inline item creation;
- Managing shortcuts and images;
- Applying themes in design time and easily switching between them - the Choose Theme command in the Smart tag automatically detects the present themes;
- Visual Style Builder, Element Hierarchy Editor, and Shape Editor productivity tools for full control over the UI.
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Appearance

All menu controls are shipped with a rich set of themes that allow you to easily build slick interfaces with the look-and-feel of Windows Vista, Office 2007, Outlook, etc. The themes can be easily switched using a single property.

In addition to the built-in themes, all RadControls for WinForms come with a feature we call Theme Color Blending, which allows for tweaking the color scheme of a theme, without the need to redo the theme from scratch. The updated color scheme is applied to all Telerik WinForms controls that you are using in your application for a fresh new look. Or you can build a new theme from scratch to fit your exact visual demands by using the Visual Style Builder productivity tool.

Telerik Menus are also capable of displaying rich text formatting by using standard HTML tags, such as <i>, <b>, and <u>. This is supported on a framework level.

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Localization Support

Telerik Menus provide full localization support. See Localization and Right-to-Left Support for the full list of Telerik Windows Forms controls supporting Localization and RTL languages.
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CAB Integration

Telerik Menu and ContextMenu for Windows Forms provide seamless integration with the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) smart client and its underlying infrastructure. The Composite UI Application Block is designed to help in building complex, enterprise-ready Windows Forms solutions by providing a proven architecture and implementation, based on common patterns found in line-of-business front-end applications. For more information please review RadControls for WinForms CAB Support.
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