One of many new features in DotNetBar 6.0 are Office 2007 style Galleries. What is Gallery? It is a component that presents the choice to the user visually. It also gives you flexibility in how you present the commands to the user. For example, instead of standard textual menus commands or just a small image on toolbar, you can display large image that actually shows what the command does, say image alignment inside of document or how document template looks like.
If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard “Can you make that image larger?” 🙂 Now it is much easier. Most galleries use images sized 32×32 pixels and larger.
Main features of Gallery component are:
- Scrolling ability
- Drop-down ability to display all possible choices on popup menu
- Ability to host any of our items, buttons, labels, check-boxes etc.
- Flexible layout
Here is screenshot of Gallery on ribbon control:
And here is the screenshot of the same gallery expanded so it is shown on drop-down:
Our Office 2007 style Gallery component provides you with the lots of flexibility, but minimum coding. Actually, for most common scenarios you do not have to write any code at all to get the full Gallery functionality. Here are main features:
- Ability to automatically resize itself on Ribbon. You can specify Default Size, Minimum Size and whether Gallery can resize at all.
- Two auto-sizing modes
- Incremental, Gallery is resized so only whole items fit inside of it
- Free size, Gallery is resized to fill available space
- Automatic drop-downs. You do not have to write any code to drop-down gallery. It is completely automatic.
- Scrolling support in both inline and popup mode. If popup cannot fit the screen Gallery will automatically enable the scroll bars so you can scroll through the options.
- Additional menu items when in popup mode. In picture above you can see that 3 additional menu items were added that are not displayed when gallery is displayed inline.
- Ability to display arbitrarily-sized graphics. The layout engine inside of the Gallery is very flexible and you can use any image size even very large images.
- Ability to host any DotNetBar item. You can add standard buttons, labels, check-boxes, option boxes, containers etc.
I know it is hard to visualize how this all actually works so we created a Movie Tutorial. It will teach you how to create and use galleries in under 4 minutes. It is that easy 🙂
That is all for today… More on Monday…
DotNetBar is an easy to use Windows Forms component for Visual Studio.NET 2005 that helps you create professional user interfaces with ease.
[tags]DotNetBar, Office 2007, Office 2007 Galleries, VS.NET, Windows Forms, Visual Studio, Components, WinForms[/tags]
