SandBar is a powerful, easy to use toolbar and menu library for Windows Forms. It boasts a comprehensive range of features designed to give your applications a great looking interface while minimizing development costs. SandBar gives you toolbars, menuing, statusbars and task panes that emulate the look of Office 2003, Office XP or Visual Studio 2005 and are fully configurable without having to write a single line of code.

The designer support in SandBar is unparalleled by any other toolbar/menu library. Interacting with toolbars and menubars at design time is just like using them at runtime with extra controls to add and manipulate buttons. Full drag and drop of items is supported between toolbars and menus. Menu designers that present your menus at design time just the way they are presented at runtime make configuring an advanced menu system as easy as point and click.

Need to upgrade an existing .net form to make use of the SandBar library? No problem. The SandBar designers will automatically convert existing standard .net menus and toolbars, from copying properties to binding the events for you. It's as easy as answering a prompt when SandBar is first added to your form.

There are no clunky collection editors or new windows to open up for configuration, making SandBar the most productive library of its kind to work with. As well as using the specialised containers for redocking, you have the option to use any of the controls in a standalone, locked form - including the ToolBar, MenuBar, ContainerBar, StatusBar and FlatComboBox.

SandBar Features in Depth

SandBar has a robust set of features, all geared to help the developer create the perfect toolbar/menuing system. Most of its features are highly customisable and extensible.

Flexible layout system
Task panes
Localization

Toolbars

Can be standalone in any container or part of a SandBar layout to allow docking and floating.
Can be docked at any orientation, allowing for vertical button layout.
Support imagelists, direct icon assignment or direct image assignment.
The user's chosen layout can easily be persisted to and restored from a file.
Any control can be hosted on a toolbar by extending base classes.
All text is fully localisable.
Right-to-left layout is fully supported for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic.
ContainerBars extend the toolbar to give the Office task pane look and feel.
StatusBars extend the toolbar to give specialised statusbar appearance and functionality.
Easy linking of toolbar items to menu items removes the need to write code to handle toolbar button activation.
Automatic toolbar conversion can convert your standard .net toolbars to SandBar toolbars.
In-situ editing of toolbar items at design time including drag-and-drop and clipboard support.

Menuing

Supports smooth animations including slide, fade and unfold.
Support imagelists, direct icon assignment or direct image assignment.
Completely proprietary menu system allows docking, floating and even hosted controls.
Any top-level menu item can be used as a context menu on any control.
Optional automatic MDI window list functionality.
Optional automatic menu merging functionality.
Little-used items can be initially hidden until the user clicks a chevron button.
Right-to-left layout is fully supported for languages such as Hebrew or Arabic.
Shortcut pairs are supported for advanced editing operations (e.g. Ctrl+K, Ctrl-C).
Automatic menu conversion can convert your standard .net menus to SandBar menus.
Advanced menu designers allow you to design and configure your menu system visually.

Look and Feel

Pluggable renderer system allows complete control over drawing of all toolbar and menu items.
Includes renderers to mimic Office XP, Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005.
Other renderers are available for download from this site.

Flexible Layout System

SandBar includes a powerful layout engine which allows you to give your users maximum flexibility when customising your applications. SandBar uses this layout engine to power its various controls, including toolbars, menus, statusbars and containerbars. These controls can be docked to any location in your container or floated at any location on the screen. Docked bars can sit next to other bars and slide in to position automatically when the layout changes. They can optionally stretch to fill available space on their row.

As well as being movable, bars can also be torn off the sides of the form in to a floating state. They then stay hovering above your form, visible when the form is active, until the user drags them back in to a container or changes their position. While floating, a toolbar can be resized; items wrap intelligently to fit in the layout space available. Persisting the toolbar layouts configured by your users is made easy with two simple functions, which can optionally persist the visible states of all the buttons on the toolbar.

"Action Buttons" at the end of each toolbar provide access to any buttons that are hidden due to space constraints, and also allow the user to turn buttons on and off at will.

When short of space, buttons are either hidden and accessed via a "chevron" that appears in the actions button on the end of a toolbar, or wrapped to the next line. Five different levels of importance can be applied to toolbar items, and those that are least important can be hidden first when space gets tight.

The SandBar menuing system can be heavily customised and extended by the developer. For instance, you may want a popup menu that looks different from standard menus in order to better present a specific set of options. An example of this is the dropdown colour selection tool in Microsoft Word, which shows many options on one row as well as an option to choose a custom colour. An example of writing a custom menu is provided with the SandBar demonstration application.



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