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A portion of the demonstration application running with the "Blue" color scheme.

SandRibbon is a user interface suite designed to mimic the advanced controls seen in Microsoft Office 2007. Its features revolve around a Ribbon control, which presents a well-organised list of available commands, divided into logical groups with some groups displayed contextually. It is designed to plug in to your applications and serve as a replacement for the traditional menus and toolbars paradigm.

All major features of the Office 2007 user interface are made available through this library, and we provide many classes to make common tasks easier for document-oriented applications, as well as the user interface controls themselves. In this way we enable you to take advantage of such features as enhanced screentips, recently-used documents lists, rich popups, galleries, live preview, animations and many more.

Along with the top-level controls in the suite, there is a manager component that helps tie your interface together for consistency and ease of development. We also provide the RibbonForm class so you can choose to have your applications adopt the new custom shaped windows.

SandRibbon has accessibility built in to it from the ground up. We automatically adjust the look of the controls for high-contrast and high-DPI modes, and support for right-to-left reading order is pervasive throughout the product. We support the Active Accessibility APIs so that your application will be accessible by people who rely on screen readers or magnifiers. Like the Office UI, elements are smoothly scrolled to expose children that would otherwise have been clipped due to screen real estate. All these features work automatically, requiring no extra development.

The application menu is simple to use and has a convenient recently-used documents list.

We wrote an advanced lightweight windowless control library for SandRibbon that sits behind the scenes enabling the smooth animations and transitions that can be seen in the product. This library can be taken advantage of by developers wishing to extend the library with their own custom widgets. It's easy to create a custom control that can be added to any SandRibbon element. Included in the package are Blue, Silver, Black and System color schemes, and you can easily create your own or choose to completely redefine how the built-in controls are drawn.

The popup capabilities of the product extend far beyond those of previous menuing controls. Any type of widget, including scrollable galleries, color pickers with graduations, sliders and of course menus can be placed on a popup. We support "Live Preview" by exposing events that enable your application to show a preview of a menu command before the user activates it.

Read More: Ribbon Anatomy