Quickstart Tutorial - harborsiem/WinForms-Ribbon GitHub Wiki

Quickstart Tutorial

Here I will show how you can start using the Windows Ribbon Framework with .NET Windows Forms.

Prepare your developer machine Installation of Visual Studio (any version since Visual Studio 2022 up to newer ones) is required to create and modify the ribbon on a developer machine. Minimum installation components in Visual Studio are .NET Desktop Development and C++ Desktop Development. Installation of the Windows SDK which is suitable for your Windows version eg. If you have Windows 7 as Operating System (OS), then you have to install Windows 7 SDK. If you have Windows 10, then you have to install Windows 10 SDK. Minimum required OS is Windows 7.

  1. Download and install latest version of RibbonFramework (RibbonFramework.dll, RibbonTools64.exe)

The library RibbonFramework.dll you can get from NuGet as a package CCW version or RCW version. Download "RibbonTools.zip" from the latest release in the Releases page of the GitHub repository. Unzip "RibbonTools.zip" and install "RibbonTools.msi". RibbonTools.msi installs the components to the 64 Bit ProgramFiles folder RibbonTools64 and adds the folder to the Environment Path. RibbonTools64.exe will build a RibbonMarkup.ribbon file by default and optional other files. You can start the app RibbonTools64 from Windows Startmenu or from a command line.

!Note
Sometimes the installation of the *.msi files are blocked by Windows. In this case go to the file properties and unblock the file. See picture below.

msi

  1. Create a WinForms application with ribbon support

See First WinForms Ribbon Application in this Wiki. For more Ribbon functionality use the RibbonTools64 for designing, building and previewing your application. Use the partial wrapper class RibbonItems.Designer.cs and extend this class or another class with code behind (events, logic, etc) for the Ribbon. That’s all. So, have a lot of fun playing with the samples included in this Github repository too.