RibbonBar buttons are all gray at startup

[Charles Bates]

Hello,
Our deployed SL 4 application has some strange startup behavior -- all the controls are gray, as though disabled, until the mouse is moved over them.
This includes the buttons on the RibbonBar, the text in the rich text boxes, and the tabs on the closed docking panes.
I have not seen this running locally.  I suspect it has something to do with Release v. Debug builds.

Thanks for any insight into this...
We are using the 2010.1.422.1030 release.

[Tina Stancheva]

Hello Charles Bates,

Please accept our apology for the delayed response.

We are not aware of such issues with the RibbonBar control and unfortunately we aren't able to reproduce it locally. This is why I wanted to ask you to please isolate the issue in a small running sample and send it to us so that we can further investigate your case.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Kind regards,
Tina Stancheva
the Telerik team

[Charles Bates]

Hello,
It seems the behavior is related to using the BusyIndicator control.  Here is a very slimmed down version of our application.

<Grid >
    <toolkit:BusyIndicator x:Name="AppBusyIndicator"  >
        <Grid x:Name = "LayoutRoot" >
                <!--  RibbonBar  -->
                <ribbon:RadRibbonBar x:Name = "ribbonBar" HorizontalAlignment = "Stretch" >
                </ribbon:RadRibbonBar>
                <!-- end of entire rad ribbon bar -->
            </Grid>
            <dock:RadDocking x:Name = "Docking" Grid.Row = "1"  >
                <dock:RadDocking.DocumentHost>
                    <dock:RadSplitContainer >
                        <dock:RadPaneGroup AllowDrop = "True" />
                        <dock:RadPaneGroup AllowDrop = "True" Visibility = "Collapsed" />
                    </dock:RadSplitContainer>
                </dock:RadDocking.DocumentHost>
                <dock:RadSplitContainer x:Name = "dockLeft"  Orientation = "Vertical" Width = "260">
                    <dock:RadPaneGroup >
                    </dock:RadPaneGroup>
                    <dock:RadPaneGroup tagsGroup">
                    </dock:RadPaneGroup>
                </dock:RadSplitContainer>
            </dock:RadDocking>
        </Grid>
    </toolkit:BusyIndicator>
</Grid>

At startup, we typically create 5 RadTabItem controls.  Each TabItem contains a Canvas; each canvas can have scores of user controls added to it.
We dismiss the BusyIndicator when we have finished populating the ViewModels and creating all the View controls.  I don't know what the exact threshold for the number of tabs/usercontrols is, but at a certain point the BusyIndicator is slow to dismiss, and the Rad controls - buttons, docking pane tabs, tabitem tabs, etc, are drawn as though disabled.  When mouse cursor moves over them, they are drawn in their correct state.
If we don't use the BusyIndicator, but use a Wait cursor instead, we don't see the strange gray behavior.

However, there is a problem using the wait cursor:  it is difficult to know when all the tabitems are fully populated and displayed.
We have tried hooking RadTabItem.Loaded for each tab item, and changing the cursor when we count the correct number of tabs has been created.  However, this doesn't work as expected.  We have tried hooking RadTabControl.Loaded; it, too, fires the Loaded event before everything is drawn and ready.
Any suggestions how to solve either of  these problems would be appreciated...

[Tina Stancheva]

Hi Charles Bates,

Have you tried using the RadBusyIndicator control instead of the toolkit BusyIndicator? It should work in the described scenario out-of-the-box. But if you find any issues with it, please let us know so that we can further investigate the case.

Regards,
Tina Stancheva
the Telerik team

[Charles Bates]

Thanks for the reply.  In what version of the controls did the RadBusyIndicator first appear?

[Tina Stancheva]

Hello Charles Bates,

The control was included in the Q2 2010 official release.

Regards,
Tina Stancheva
the Telerik team

[Charles Bates]

Thanks for the reply.  
I have tried the RadBusyIndicator in the 2010 Q3 version of the controls.
It appears to have eliminated the problem with the docking pane tabs, tab control tags, buttons, etc., but the content of the tab items (richtextboxes, mostly) are still appearing as disabled until the cursor moves over them.  This only happens when we have a lot of content on several (4 or 5 or more) RadTabitems.

[Tina Stancheva]

Hello Charles Bates,

There were such issues in the control but they are already fixed. Can you test your scenario with the latest version of our controls and let us know how that goes?

Regards,
Tina Stancheva
the Telerik team