Nope, we did not put them on caffeine only diet (that’s reserved for myself
though 😉 ) or feed them too much sugar, rather a healthy dose of our mini-markup
language.
If you follow Jensen’s Harris blog on Office 12 or are in Office 12 beta program
you noticed that menus in new Office are little richer ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/02/06/525704.aspx )
than plain old text menus. They have textual menu item separators, descriptions for
menu items etc. Here is picture from our RibbonPad sample that illustrates what
I mean:
The idea is to provide descriptive content for certain menus where just one or two
word label would not convey the actual meaning of the command. Screenshot above is
just used to illustrate functionality, since I doubt that these often used commands
would need description, but you get the idea.
So what was added to DotNetBar? Well, starting with next release you will be able
to use our mini-markup language to decorate the menu items, labels, and buttons on
toolbars or ribbon tabs. It will also work in body text of our Super Tooltip control
and regular tooltip control.
BTW, that screenshot above is from our RibbonPad sample made with next release of
DotNetBar.
What is Mini-Markup?
For example, Open menu item from the screenshot above would have its Text property
set to:
<b>&Open</b><br/><font size=”-1”>Open an existing
file in new tab</font>
Our mini-markup is similar to HTML so it should be very natural and easy to pick up.
It has much less functionality than HTML and only couple of essential tags are supported.
Idea is to enrich user experience and provide better description of commands. Mini-markup
must be well formed, meaning all tags must be properly closed and nested, just like
XML.
On the implementation side, the actual mini-markup engine and rendering are written
from ground-up by us and rendering is highly optimized so it does not interfere with
out high-performance menus and toolbars.
This build will be available to our registered users tomorrow and final release
is planned in next couple of weeks. Enjoy.
Denis Basaric, DevComponents LLC.
