Hey folks,

successfully migrated RadTabstrip to AJAX Tabstrip but when using the Skin "Office 2007" the background colour does not longer match to the background colour of AJAX Menu... RadTabStrip did so why the change?

Hello Adrian Porger,

The change is due to a skin redesign that will be performed on RadMenu, too. There have been too many complaints about the size and usability of the current Office2007 skin, so its improved version will be available with SP1 of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.

Greetings,
Alex
the Telerik team

I'm not sure I follow. The old Office2007 skin tabstrip looked like Office2007. The new one does not. If people were having issues with the old skin, why not just create a new one for them rather than changing the existing one, which will cause us to have to redesign the look and feel of a number of elements which used to go well with the pre-existing skin?

Also, I would be interested in hearing what sorts of issues people had with old Office2007 skin. I have never had any issues with it's "size and usability". You may be referring to the Rad Menu Office2007 skin. In this case, I do see the potential issues, however, I would say if they don't want a menu to look like Office2007, then they should use a different skin. That's exactly what it looks like. Either way, even if you redesign the menu skin, why make such a dratic change to the toolbar skin?

The problem is...

In most scenarios, tabs are use with multipages. Often the multipage background should match the tab color so it looks like they are integrated. First of all, the new skin uses a gradient, which in itself is not ideal. However, the bigger problem is that the bottom edge of the new tab is practically white. There are few scenarios where it is advantageous to have a white tab and multipage background. In fact, most of the time, you want a dark tab/multipage on a light background instead of the opposite. The old skin, with it's solid light blue color did this perfectly. This new skin means we have to reverse the foreground/background, and it simply does not look very good.

Overall, this is just one of those issues that is very frustrating. Throughout the Promethus process it has been somewhat of a struggle to upgrade functionality from the Rad Controls classic framework. As of the latest Prometheus build, I, like many people, were finally able to get things working properly. Then the official release comes, and tada!, some of the base skins have changed in major ways. I realize things like the tabstrip and toolbar were not part of earlier Prometheus releases, however was it unreasonable to assume that they will look to a great degree the same? I am almost tempted to stay with the classic versions of the tabstrip and toolbar for design purposes. This would undoubtedly lead to integration issues, but I'm thinking ironing those out would take less time than redesigning my entire site around a new Office2007 skin.

Hi Albert Shenker,

Thank you for your detailed feedback. We will consider the issues that you describe as we develop our skins in the future.

The problem with the RadMenu Office2007 skin had to be solved this way because of the integration between RadMenu and other RadControls (e.g. RadTreeView, RadGrid). We will do our best so that every skin that is made obsolete is made available as external so that one could easily revert to the old version of the skin without much hassle.

Sincerely yours,
Alex
the Telerik team

Ok, that's fine, but again, my issue was not with any redesign to the RadMenu skin, it was the redesign of the Tabstrip skin. Can you let me know where I can ifno about using the prior Office2007 Tabstrip skin?

Hello Albert Shenker,

You can find the requested (old) Office2007 skin for the RadTabStrip attached to this post.

Greetings,
Alex
the Telerik team