Microsoft Ribbon for WPF vs. Office RIbbon UI

Question

Microsoft released Microsoft Ribbon for WPF available for download here.

We also have RibbonControlsLibrary.dll, which is a ribbon control too, available for download from Office sites. Currenty it is in CTP version.

Now, which is the difference between these 2 version of ribbons ?

Until now I identified that:

• MS Ribbon for WPF doesn't have any theming support and it has an Office 2010 ribbon look and feel. No support for Office 2007 ribbon look and feel.

• The ribbon from RibbonControlsLibrary.dll (still CTP) supports theming for Office 2007 look and feel and also supports Office 2010 look and feel. But it doesn't run properly with .NET 4.0. There are some bugs when displaying controls such as comboboxes,textboxes.

Does anybody else worked with these ? Can you give me a link to a stable version of RibbonControlsLibrary.dll ? Does it exists ? Is in fact MS Ribbon for WPF the RTW for the RibbonControlsLibrary.dll or there are just 2 separate ribbons ?

Answer 1

Microsoft has been all over the board with ribbon controls. At one point, there awere at least three different versions floating around. My understanding is that the WPF team has settled on the new Microsoft Ribbon for WPF as the 'official' version of the ribbon. It uses the Windows 'Scenic' ribbon UI (as seen in the Windows 7 Paint and WordPad applications), as opposed to the Office 2007 'Fluent' Ribbon UI found in some earlier controls. I think the WPF team is steering developers away from the Fluent ribbon, and toward the Scenic ribbon.

If you want an Office 2010 look, with it's 'backstage' feature, there are a number of commercial and OpenSource projects that implement that UI. I have played around with the Fluent Ribbon Control Suite, a free control available on CodePlex, and it seems to do a pretty good job in WPF 4, with decent documentation.

Hope that helps!