If you need the basic concepts about Ribbon Control, read the first part of my previous post.

1. Download the Ribbon Control binaries here.

2. Create a Windows Forms Visual Studio Project.

3. Add reference to the downloaded System.Windows.Forms.Ribbon.dll

4. Declare a System.Windows.Forms.Ribbon reference in Designer.cs file of your form and create an object (you also need to add some more supporting code). Be sure to include System.Windows.Forms to your code. Your .Designer.cs file should look somewhat like this;

using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace DMProject

{

    partial class Form1

    {

        /// <summary>

        /// Required designer variable.

        /// </summary>

        private System.ComponentModel.IContainer components = null;

        private System.Windows.Forms.Ribbon ribbon1 = null;

        /// <summary>

        /// Clean up any resources being used.

        /// </summary>

        /// <param name="disposing">true if managed resources should be disposed; otherwise, false.</param>

        protected override void Dispose(bool disposing)

        {

            if (disposing && (components != null))

            {

                components.Dispose();

            }

            base.Dispose(disposing);

        }

        #region Windows Form Designer generated code

        /// <summary>

        /// Required method for Designer support - do not modify

        /// the contents of this method with the code editor.

        /// </summary>

        private void InitializeComponent()

        {

            this.ribbon1 = new System.Windows.Forms.Ribbon();

            this.SuspendLayout();

            // 

            // ribbon1

            // 

            // 

            // Form1

            // 

            this.AutoScaleDimensions = new System.Drawing.SizeF(6F, 13F);

            this.AutoScaleMode = System.Windows.Forms.AutoScaleMode.Font;

            this.ClientSize = new System.Drawing.Size(284, 262);

            this.Controls.Add(this.ribbon1);

            this.Name = "Form1";

            this.Text = "Form1";

            this.ResumeLayout(false);

        }

        #endregion

    }

}

Your Windows Form Should look like this;

From this point onward, adding controls to the ribbon should be easy.

5. To add a tab to your ribbon control, click ‘Add Tab’. I have added three tabs; Home, Data Manipulation and Visualization. As with any control, you can change the properties of the tabs using the properties grid.

You can now compile and run the application, it would look like the screenshot above.

6. The next step is to add a panel to contain the buttons. To do this, click the ‘Add Panel’ button. Change the properties of the panels as desired.

7. Once the panels have been created, click a panel. The property grid shows options for the panel. Besides ‘Add Button’, these options include ‘Add Button List’, ‘Add Item Group’, ‘Add Separator’ etc. Click the ‘Add Button’ command. A button is created. You can use the property grid to set the text, tool tip and image for the button.

To add images to these buttons, you first have add the PNG images to your project resources. To do this, right click on your project and click Properties. In the resources tab, select ‘Add Existing File’ and browse for your PNG icons.

Congratulations! you have successfully added a ribbon control to your Windows Forms Application. You are good to go!

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Handling User Input

This topic describes how you can take input from a user on a windows form and use that input.

Once you have created a Windows Forms Application, add a textbox control to the windows form. You can do this by dragging the control from the toolbox to the windows form and place it wherever you may please. It is always a good idea to place a label (static text box) next to a text box that describes what the text box takes as an input. You can also place this static text control in the same manner. Also add a push button below the two controls.

You can change the text on a control and its identifier (ID) by editing its properties. To do this right click on a control and click properties. The properties panel opens up. The two main properties we will be concerned with are Text and ID. It is highly recommended that you play around with the other properties as well.

I have changed the ID of the textbox to textboxMessage. The ID of the other two controls has not been changed.

Now what we need to do is to create a create a EventHandler for the pushbotton. A EventHandler is a function when an Event occurs. You will become familiar with events as we move further in this tutorial. E.g. the click on a button is an event.

To create an even handler, click on a control and click on the lightning button on the properties panel.

In the push button events, click on the ‘Click’ event. This will create an EventHandler (a function) which is called when the button is pressed.

Once you double click on the event, you would be taken to the code of the event handler. In the event handler function add the following line.

MessageBox::Show(this->textBoxMessage->Text);

Your code should now look like this

   1: private: System::Void button1_Click(System::Object *  sender, System::EventArgs *  e)

   2:          {

   3:              MessageBox::Show(this->textBoxMessage->Text);

   4:          }

The MessageBox is a build in class with a static function Show. This function shows a message box with the given String. We get this string from the textbox we have created.

To get this string we first access the textBoxMessage control from the form class using the this pointer. Once we do this, we then use –> to access its properties. One of these properties is the Text. Again i would recommend that you play around with these properties.

Now compile and run the project, it should do something like this.

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All the data is courtesy MSDN.

Creating a Windows Forms Project

The foundation of most solutions that involve Windows Forms is the Windows Application project. Creating a project is easy within the integrated development environment (IDE).

To create a Windows Application project

1. On the File menu, point to New, and then select Project.

2. In the Project Types pane, choose the programming language you want to use.

3. In the Templates pane, choose Windows Application for Visual Basic, Visual J#, or Visual C# projects, or choose Windows Forms Application (.NET) for Visual C++ projects. We will mostly concern ourselves with C++.

   The Windows Forms Designer opens, showing Form1 of the project you created.

Display Windows Forms in the Designer

Within the Windows Forms Designer, you can view the forms within your project and their controls.

To view forms in the Windows Forms Designer

• In Solution Explorer, double-click the form. For details, see Windows Forms Overview.

  If Solution Explorer is not visible, select it from the View menu or press CTRL+W, S.

To view the code for a form

• In Solution Explorer, select the form and then click the View Code button. You can also right-click the form in Solution Explorer and choose the View Code item in the shortcut menu.

If the designer has focus, press F7 to switch to the Code Editor.

Next

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