Stuck between a Ribbon and a hard place
I'm stuck. While some people will disagree with me, I like the Ribbon. It's a cool idea and looks sharp. As a side note, I convinced a customer we would incorporate it into their business app as the corporatation was moving to Office 2007 this year anyways, and they would be stuck with it. We'll be the first app using it and the customer is quite happy after seeing what it does and how they can use it. Anyways, back to my problem.
SharePoint Builder is a free, Smart Client app that is coming out shortly (I think the alpha release is a couple of days away). The Ribbon concept kind of works with it as I can envision Ribbon buttons for different types of site definitions the editor handles (sites, lists, features, etc.) with Ribbon groups inside for items in those files, and the ability to add, edit, and delete them. This paradigm works with the Ribbon with the alternative option using traditional menus and toolbars (which works as well but isn't as sexy looking or functional).
The trouble is finding a library out there to implement the Ribbon control. There are tons of libraries available now that provide the Ribbon control (DotNetBar, DevExpress, etc.) and they all work equally well. If I did have a choice of a commercial package I would probably go with DevExpress. I have a copy of it, it follows the Microsoft Guidelines for the Ribbon pretty closely, works well and is easy to implement. Therein lies my trouble. SharePoint Builder is a free project, and open source to boot. I'm not about to offer up a free, open source tool that relies on an expensive (or inexpensive for that matter), closed, commercial control. I simply won't do it.
The only free, open source Ribbon I found out there was a GotDotNet project however it was pretty far off from the MS guidelines for Ribbon apps. This might spark a debate as most people don't agree that control authors should follow the guidelines put out my Microsoft however they're published and out there and if I'm going to use a Ribbon control in an app of mine, I'm going to do so with one that's as close to the guidelines as possible. The GDN project is too far off from being compatible and while it sort of looks like the Ribbon, it certainly doesn't behave like it (which I think is the main point of the Ribbon control concept anyways).
So it doesn't look like a Ribbon is going to work here unless someone else has some thoughts. I'm already swamped in work so really don't have time to build my own open source Ribbon to offer this project (and everyone else once it was built) and the ones out there don't measure up to the guidelines. A free copy of a commercial package isn't the issue as I don't want others to not be able to build the application, and a trimmed down "donation" copy of a commercial package isn't going to work either as it's only as good as long as the company is out there (and there's the problem of what happens if/when it breaks or needs an update). I guess menus and toolbars it is for this project.