Raj Kaimal

Classic Menu UI in Office 2007

So my 65 year old neighbor called me yesterday because he was frustrated with the Office 2007 Ribbon on his brand new machine...

After googling around, I found a great add-in for Office 2007 by Patrick Schmid called the RibbonCustomizer. It comes in two versions - the free Starter Edition and the Professional edition. Both versions, in addition to customizing the Ribbon, give you a "Classic UI" tab which emulate the Office 2003 menus and toolbars.

As you can see from the screen captures, it does not replace the Ribbon UI but adds onto it, which, IMHO, lets the user work with a familiar UI and allows them to slowly transition into the new UI.

For a core product like the Office Suite, Microsoft should have provided this ability by default.

My neighbor couldn't be happier...

.NET Framework Libraries Source Code - License - MS-RL

When I first read Scott's post, I missed the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) which the .net Framework libraries is released under.

The key thing to remember is this:

"Reference use" means use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software, and specifically excludes the right to distribute the software outside of your company.

.NET Framework Libraries Source Code

Scott just announced that his team will be  releasing the souce code to the .NET base class libraries, ASP.net, Windows Forms and WPF!

The big advantage to this is that when you are stepping through the code, you no longer see the horrible "[External Code]' in your call stack. You are taken right to the source code! This really really helps in understanding how the internals of the classes work.

Wonder what I am going to do with reflector...hmm...

Read more at Scotts' blog

PS: The source code is being released under Ms-RL which means that I can view but I'm not allowed to copy and paste the source code.