Yes, in version 4.0 of BinaryRibbon WPF .NET, skinning the control is an absolute pleasure... trust me! :-)
Have a nice set of colours ready in your mind for "that gorgeous" custom skin that you want to apply on the Ribbon control?
Good news! Those colours in your mind are all that you will need, to skin the Ribbon in just few minutes.
The upcoming version 4.0 exposes a set of very easy and intuitive API that you can use to create and apply your custom skin for the control.
The API expose the ComponentResourceKeys (CRKs) of all the relevant resource objects that are used by the control, to render the Ribbon.
You will simply create a custom resource dictionary, use the exposed API to set the various brushes/resources, and merge the dictionary into your Application object's Resources. That is all to it!
Using this API, I was able to create a custom skin and get the app running, in about less than 5 minutes :-) (Of course, I had in mind those desired skin colours ready when I started to create the custom skin).
I have also updated the documentation to show in detail (in XAML as well as in Procedural code) as to how to go about creating your own skin for Ribbon - simple and straight-forward.
New custom skins, out-of-the-box
As announced earlier, Release 4.0 of BinaryRibbon WPF, will come with ready to use new additional skins (on top of the already existing 3 Office skins and 1 Windows 7 skin), that you can use straight out-of-the-box.
These custom skins cover 10 different colour themes.
I wanted to show off some of these new custom built-in skins that are available in version 4.0 / Release 10:
Here you go...
Brown
Yellow
Creamy green
Green
Pale Orange
There are five more colour skins in the control. You can play around with these once I make the Release 10 package available to public.
Glass support for the Application menu button
One other new feature you will note (even from the screen-shots above) in the upcoming release is that the the Application menu button now supports more precise "glass" rendering, and also can be skinned by accepting a background colour for its internal glass fill :-)
There is more to write on the features of Release 10... stay tuned for my next set of blog posts on the details and screen-shots of:
- The new WPF controls in Ribbon 4.0,
- The newer features in Ribbon 4.0 (you can read those hints from my earlier post)
- The cool animation effect of mouse hovering on non-selected Ribbon tab item headers, and
- A new suite of ScrollViewer and ScrollBar.NET WPF controls
Just a couple of more days to go for Release 10 going public :-)
Stay tuned.
- Sundar
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