Ribbon control is designed to simplify the access to large number of commands for the end user and it really does a great job in doing so. That however creates the opportunity for your code to be centralized in a single form with the Ribbon control. Would it be neat if things were easier for us developers as well?

DotNetBar 6.0 includes built-in, no code required, Ribbon MDI Merging functionality. If your application uses MDI interface, you can take advantage of this great feature that merges MDI Child Ribbons into the main MDI Ribbon completely automatically.

How do you use this?

At design-time you add RibbonBarMergeContainer to your MDI Child forms. Inside this visual container, which is not visible at run-time, you add your RibbonBar controls. You handle the RibbonBar events and write the code for event handlers inside each MDI Child form.

At run-time, you display your MDI Child forms as usual and the RibbonBar controls that you have placed inside the merge container automatically merge into the MDI Parent Ribbon Control. New Ribbon Tab (default) or an existing tab will be used.

We take care of the displaying the relevant Ribbon tabs as your MDI Child forms are activated and we also clean up after you close them. You can merge the MDI Child RibbonBar controls into an existing tab and we provide you with the plenty of events that fire before and after each action is completed.

No code is needed, to enable this feature. It is completely design-time based; you design everything on the form directly.
To help you better visualize and get the feel for this I created a Video that will teach you how to use this feature in under 4 minutes. See it here.

Enjoy.

DotNetBar is a Windows Forms component for Visual Studio.NET 2005 that helps you create professional user interfaces with ease.[tags]DotNetBar, Office 2007, Ribbon, MDI, Windows Forms, Visual Studio, Components, WinForms[/tags]