In the new WPF application we write, we will be using DevExpress controls suite, and will have a Ribbon.
Currently, the options I see are:
Microsoft - The vendor's offer, probably will get into the library on the next release
DevExpress - The controls library we know and love
Fluent - Open-source, got generally good recommendations
How do the different available ribbon controls compare? What features are / are not supported?
Fluent Ribbon here!
The Microsoft one lacks good support
Update:
Please vote on the Microsoft UserVoice site about the buggy Ribbon control:
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide
Fluent Ribbon is I believe a great choice if you're looking to customize the styling of your ribbon. For example, Microsoft's Ribbon control has had theme options removed and is now only shipped with a single theme.
From my experience, Fluent Ribbon is not so great at design time building in Visual Studio, but in all other areas is superb. It is Open Source so can be customised to your needs and, coupled with MahApps Metro package, you can have complete Metro-styled applications with ease. Below is a screenshot of a sample application made with Fluent.Ribbon, using its 'Office 2013' theme.
Other commercial Ribbons are available and offer more features (such as three-state visibility, as show below in a screenshot from Outlook 2013)
I would advise making a list of all the features you require from the Ribbon control before deciding which one to use and whether a paid commercial Ribbon makes sense for your scenario. In your case, you already have access to DevExpress, so perhaps that may be your best choice.
I believe one of the most used is the Microsoft one.
Microsoft's Ribbon library (October 2010) does not work well with non standard DPI settings. And it's design time support is not good.
Comparing to Microsoft one, I personally think Actipro Ribbon is a better choice. It has EXCELLENT design time support, and works well with non standard DPI.
I have not tried any other Ribbon library yet.
Related
I'm using a Windows Form Application in Visual Studio 2013 to design a prototype for a software. I'm not a software-developer, the only purpose of the project is to communicate with the dev-team to let them know what the end-product is supposed to look like.
There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing control, like buttons, textboxes, etc. so I was wondering if it is possible to attach stylesheets to VB.NET projects? Thank you
There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing
control, like buttons, textboxes, etc.
NO. winforms is a really old technology that basically has no amount of built-in support for custom UIs. It is not recommended for any new projects (only to maintain legacy applications) and it will be completely useless if you're not a developer, since any sort of custom look and feel needs to be done with an ugly procedural code technique called "owner draw", which requires too much code for anything, and is unable to provide professional-looking UIs due to the lack of hardware acceleration and lack of support for pixel-independent UIs.
If you're doing a prototype (as opposed to a real application), as others have recommended, you should use design tools such as Photoshop, or maybe a quick HTML + CSS kind of approach.
Otherwise, you can easily create a modern-looking application using a technology that is the replacement of winforms, called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, for short.
There's also a design tool made specifically for this technology, called Expression Blend, which is bundled with recent versions of Visual Studio, and offers a very designer-centric approach to building UIs:
To summarize: winforms is useless. Use proper, relevant, current technology instead.
There are no such things as stylesheets in WinForms applications. You can change the appareance on a form and control basis by changing the Appearance properties.
You can create base controls and forms that have your appearance changes and then use those to create other forms to make things easier to design out the screen.
There are also 3rd party control sets that do have skins/themes, which maybe what you want but you have to purchase them first then you are limited to that control suite.
I just got an analysis task for an alternative Web UI for our product. My boss likes CRM 2011, so he'd like to get something similar-looking or even the CRM controls themselves, if available. We unfortunately can't build on top of the CRM, as we have pretty sophisticated needs and a very old legacy codebase.
My question: given this screenshot
how much is already available to Webdevelopers, given they target WebForms or MVC.
It seems to use some "standard" UI methodologies in MS world (very Office/desktop-like), like the ribbon, which got "free for everyone" with WPF in .NET 4.5, so maybe that's true for the webcontrols, too? Couldn't find it with a quick search, though.
If that's a dead end, what about 3rd party vendors? Anyone giving you the opportunity to use ribbon and such very desktop-like webcontrols?
Telerik has some really nice controls for dotNet. Here's the ribbon you are looking for: http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/ribbonbar/examples/overview/defaultcs.aspx
We're looking for applications that implemented the ribbon control just to see how developers other than MS Office team used this control. I tried googling a bit but the list is still short. Can you guys refer me to some good projects that are using the ribbon control the right way?
Thanks,
MR
Microsoft offers some samples if you're looking for implementation details. Or are you looking more for design ideas?
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2bfc3187-74aa-4154-a670-76ef8bc2a0b4&displaylang=en
We are a small Microsoft shop looking into ExtJs and like the rapid building of complex and structured UIs that can be achieved with the toolkit. However we have been experimenting with ExtAsp.NET (CodePlex) which is an opensource layer of ASP.NET code which wraps around the ExtJs framework. We have also noticed the Coolite framework which looks good too and does the same thing. We have 2 options, either we purchase the ExtJs license which will be required if we use ExtAsp, or we purchase the Coolite kit which includes the ExtJs license. It looks like Coolite is actually it little cheaper than the ExtJs for some reason??
However, is it a little more risky as regards upgrade path if the Coolite framework becomes unsupported, whereas ExtAsp as an open source solution will have community backing?
Just looking to make the right step.
Coolite is the official .NET partner of Ext JS, LLC, if that means anything to you. They also offer support packages just like Ext does, and the forum community looks active (I haven't looked at ExtAsp closely to compare). Regarding open source, Coolite is dual-licensed commercial and OSS (GPL3) just like Ext, so I'm not sure that concern should sway you too much. If it became unsupported for some reason, the source is fully available to the community.
I'm used to working in a Delphi and C# environment which seem to have a rich set of third party components available. I'm currently wanting to do cross-platform programming in C++ using either qt or wxwidgets. Is there a large market for third party components? I was looking at sourceforge and that doesn't seem to show much that is useful (how the hell do you find out what components or features are in a project without downloading the source?). I'm thinking carousel/coverflow components, rich datagrids (like the sort DevExpress provide). Or is this, write your own territory?
There are a number of good quality third party Qt libraries, though I don't know of a centralized resource for finding them.
A few places to start looking:
http://www.ics.com/products/qt/addons
ICS provides the
QicsTable, a high performance
model-view-delegate table library,
and resells various libraries by
KDAB. (These are all available as a
free download.)
http://www.qtcentre.org/contest-first-edition/finalists
QtCentre has an annual
programming contest which awards
interesting Qt-based tools and
libraries. This year's contest is
still being judged, but the
finalists from last year can be seen
at the above link. Check out the
Custom Widget and Helper Library
categories.
There is a third-party component for Qt - advanced data grid - Qtitan DataGrid.
In it there are almost all necessary possibilities.
Ultra-fast processing of large data sets
Use of QStyle for rendering objects ensures that the grid blends into the UI design of any application
Two modes of vertical scrolling
Customizable colors of rows and columns
Two integrated table views
Column banding and grouping
Automatic width and height adjustment
Fixed columns
Flexible sorting
Column summaries
Integrated high-performance caching mechanism
Advanced paint engine for faster rendering of UI elements
Cross-platform support
API for external editors
Screenshots about this Grid
http://www.devmachines.com/qtitan_screenshots.php
For a crossplatform GUI development, Qt is the tool you should be looking for. I have used both. Here is what I feel about Qt
Building rich GUI is a piece of cake if you use Qt. It has a loads of GUI capabilities, starting with its Graphics View, OpenGL support, stylesheets that supports css. A mature painting system, Richtext formatting, Integration with Webkit, and I am sure I am missing a lot more here...
Qt has its own build system, qmake which creates platform dependent Makefiles, so no Makefile hassles. Moreover you get a single pro-file which is much easier to manage. For wxWidgets, you will need to create different Makefiles for the various compilers you intent to use.
Other advantages of using Qt over wxWidgets are - the Api is very easy to learn with its intuitive api, superb documentation and tons and tons of examples. This helps you get yourself productive pretty soon and thus getting your product early to marker. BTW Qt is a RAD tool. Moreover, there is a huge user base, and there are forums like QtCentre.org to help you with your questions.
If you are planning to buy commercial license, you get support directly from Qt Software (trolltech).
You would obviously be using Qt's Model View pattern, allowing you to separate your business logic from the presentation tier. I would suggest that you write to "support at trolltech dot com" or "sales at trolltech dot com" to get more information. You can explain your requirements and they would be able to explain how Qt fits your needs.
You could also download the opensource version and have look at the demos.
Coverflow: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2007/11/02/pictureflow-on-windows-mobile/ , http://ariya.blogspot.com/2008/03/introducing-photoflow.html
As I said, if its Rich gui you are planning to develop, use Qt.
In addition to the ones by ICS and at QtCentre the Qt-apps website has some open source widgets/components for Qt.
For wxWidgets you have wxCode which has quite a few things although not all the existing third party components (including a few very useful ones) are available from there.
Good quality components for Qt can be found here - http://www.devmachines.com/
At the moment there are Microsoft Ribbon Control for Qt, DataGrid for Qt, Charting for Qt.
All components are commercial and should be used in Qt Commercial or Qt LGPL.