Ribbon UI Control Roundup for Developers
After yesterdays post about my babbling about the Ribbon UI and Office 2007, I decided to go out and hunt down all the libraries and controls I could find that provide that UI experience for you, the developer. I've taken out a few hours, downloaded all the samples and demos I could and gave everything a test drive. For the demos and criteria (I'm very picky about having to do silly things like RTFM) I looked at how easy it was to add the control and apply the look and feel of Office 2007 to a simple Windows Form. Was there a designer? Documentation? Demos? How much code did I have to write? Any extra stuff that came easy or for free (like built-in icons, reading in menu structure from XML, etc.) added some brownie points, but not much as the focus was just getting an Office 2007 look and feel.
For my trial samplings, I went completely commando and took a solution, added a WinForm project for each control, and went to town. If there wasn't anything obvious about how to add controls or get the Ribbon going, I would crack open the demo and, barring that, resort to actually reading something. I also had Word up and running and built a small sample with each library to mimic the Word UI by creating a tab for each section (Home, Insert, Page Layout, References, Mailings, Review, and View), groups for the first tab (Clipboard, Font, Paragraph, Styles, Editing) and button/menus for the first group (Paste, Cut, Copy, Format Painter). Building each demo should only take 10 minutes (no graphics, just setting properties and adding controls).
Here's a rundown of the toolkits available out there.
A good looking control, implements all the requirements for the Ribbon and is 100% managed C# code. Install was simple and it came with a toolbox entry with some controls you can drop onto your forms. Very simple and intuitive. You could probably get up to speed on this very easily and it appears to implement all the features the real Ribbon does. Demo was quick to build and I didn't have to refer to the help or samples. You can add tabs and groups from the built-in context menu so it's pretty intuitive. Adding the Ribbon to the form also added their own FormFrameSkinner so the entire form took shape with the Office 2007 UI look and feel automatically. Very nice. Beta version only right now.
A nice control and one of the more lightweight but compatible and powerful ones out there. Install couldn't add controls to Visual Studio (but Elegant Ribbon could?) so you have to add them manually. Once you do this you can add a Ribbon to the form. This was fine and I could right-click on a group (they call it a "Chunk") and add controls or new chunks. Overall not bad, but it didn't create the Jewel which Elegant did. If I did some more digging I could probably find out how to do this but it didn't look obvious to the controls that I could add or properties I could set. The only problem I saw was when I reloaded my sample, it couldn't figure out how to build the designer and crashed not understanding a variable called "ChunkStrip". Creating a new form and adding the Ribbon didn't have any problems. Commercial and available for purchase. Eval version is available.
Nice implementation. Only for Delphi and C++ Builder. Since I don't have either installed, I couldn't try it out the library but the demo looked like it could do the job and I gave a quick once-over on the SDK documentation and it looks pretty simple.
Part of the big gigantic entity known as DevExpress. I do have XtraBars (or DevExpress or something) laying around here but I haven't installed it. If it's anything like the XtraGrid then this is probably the cadillac of Ribbon controls but it comes at a price. I've been working with the XtraGrid for months and I still don't know how to do much with it other than replace a DataGrid. There are just a billion options, designers, editors, skins, themes, and all that so I'm sure that's been packaged into the XtraBars as well. I did run the demo and it looks good so if you're serious about building apps using the Office UI and have lots of time to kill learning something, this would be your best bet.
I've used BCG before and their suite is nice. It's all written in C++ but I'm not sure if they've moved over to the managed world yet for this control. They have a (ugh) MFC demo version that looked and behaved well exceptionally well. The thing I've always found about BCG is that their demos are not only the look and feel of the app, but some functionality. For example their Ribbon demo is Word and comes with all the icons, buttons, and graphics as the real deal but also when you click on things like the File Open button or Save toolbar, it brings up a dialog. It's a nice touch that they take more time than just building a Hello World sample but an actual demo (even if it is a shell). As for the library itself, after installing this library there were no Ribbon controls avaialble so I'm assuming they haven't released that part yet but only the demo.
These guys claim to have a Ribbon component, but unless I'm missing something obvious, I can't find it on the site.
Simple install and worked first time. Added it's own toolbox with a variety of controls (including a bunch that were not Ribbon related but things like Visual Studio 2005 style tabs, nice). Dropped a Ribbon control on a new form and then added some additional controls. Not completely intuitive about adding groups. The other controls like Elegant and SandRibbon would add tab groups, here you drag the group onto the tab which means you have to dock it and do some alignment (or maybe there's some container control you have to add first). No Jewel added automatically and I didn't see a control for it, so not sure if that's supported. Lots of really annoying nag screens everytime you add a control to your form so negative points for that.
This is from the CodeJock guys and they usually produce good stuff. The library is listed as C++/MFC (like BCG Control Bar) so it's MFC only and not a WYSIWYG type environment. Like BCG, you have to build a MFC app (using the template they provide or modifying your own MFC app) and hook in the Ribbon through resource files and source code. Sorry but I stopped doing that development years ago when C# let me focus on my domain rather than writing code to wire up UI events (and MFC is bloatware to begin with). Anyways, again the demos look good but if you're not familiar with MFC or C++, be afraid, be very afraid. If you do like to hurt yourself, this toolkit or the BCG one (if I could find the Ribbon functionality) are fine.
Bottom line
If you're serious about the Office UI and want power (as in BullDog hover-board power) then check out DevExpress. I don't think you'll be disappointed. If you're building a small app or something freeware, give Elegant UI a whirl. Even as a beta, it's quite good, easy to use, and looks just as powerful as most of the other offerings. Best of all, it's the quickest to get up and running with a Ribbon from the libraries I tried out. Most of the other ones, if you gave it an hour with any one of them, you would probably "discover" all the ways to manipulate the Ribbon (except DevExpress which would probably require a week). I'm impatient so only gave it the 10-minute litmus test but if I had to make a corporate decision rather than personal one, I would probably spend a day with a few of my favorites.
Please feel free to add any I've missed.