Quickstart Tutorial - harborsiem/WindowsRibbon GitHub Wiki

Quickstart Tutorial

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

Prepare your developer machine Installation of Visual Studio (any version since Visual Studio 2010 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 RibbonLib (Ribbon.dll, RibbonTools.exe)

Download "msi.zip" from the latest release in the Releases page of the GitHub repository. Unzip "msi.zip" and install "Ribbon.msi" and "RibbonTools.msi". Ribbon.msi installs Ribbon.dll to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). The Ribbon.dll contains a Ribbon Control and mainly the Wrapper Classes for the Ribbon Elements. RibbonTools.msi installs the components to the 32 Bit ProgramFiles folder RibbonLib and adds the folder to the Environment Path. RibbonTools.exe will build a RibbonMarkup.ribbon file and optional other files. You can start the app RibbonTools 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 RibbonTools for designing, building and previewing your application. Use the 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.