Announcing DotNetBar Suite 5.0 Release for Visual Studio.NET

(PRWEB) July 8, 2005

DevComponents LLC announced today release of DotNetBar Suite 5.0 a toolbox of 12 powerful integrated components with Office 2003/XP/2000, VS.NET 2005 and Windows XP themed look and feel that enables VS.NET developers to create professional user interface with ease.

Small list of new features in 5.0 release:

1. New BubbleBar control that can't be found anywhere else is included in this release. It helps with overcoming of small, hard-to-click toolbar buttons objections in no time.

2. New ExpandableSplitter control is simple and easy way to manage precious screen real-estate

3. New styles for tab strip and tab control that can't be found anywhere else

4. Intelligent layout persistence algorithms that manage the changes in layout and UI definitions

5. Much improved designers for controls

6. Over 20 additional new features

BubbleBar control

“Toolbar buttons are too small and it is not so easy to click the right one when in hurry.” Is the complaint offten heared by end users. BubbleBar control solves this problem. Once you hover the mouse over the toolbar correct button will bubble up, grow to predefined size, so users can easily see the button they are about to click and have larger area to click. Difference this makes is amazing, and best of all, developers are not using more precious screen real-estate.

Countless hours have been spent obsessing about every single pixel on BubbleBar control. For example buttons that bubbled are drawn outside of the control and over the background controls that might be positioned on the form. Alpha-blending is property used for disabled buttons and on the buttons that are overlaying the controls underneath.

When mouse is hovered over the button for the first time smooth bubbling animation is applied to the buttons until they reach desired size. If control is left permanently or button is cliked animation is applied which returns the buttons to their normal size. Developers have complete control over the duration of the animation effects or they can turn them off completely.Full control over the size of the buttons and maximum size they can grow to is provided as well.

Alpha-blended background for the buttons and transparency for the complete control is also built in. There are just 40 properties that allow developers to customize every aspect of the control background.

Each set of the toolbar buttons is hosted on a tab. If application calls for a single set of buttons then tabs can be simply turned off by using the TabsVisible property. Tabs will help developers logically group toolbar buttons based on function and there is complete control over their appearance.

ExpandableSplitter Control

Management of the screen real-estate in today’s busy applications is very important. The simple way to help with that is the usage of splitter control combined with the ability to expand/collapse attached control completely and that way free up significant amounts of screen real estate.

The meticulous care was taken while designing the animation algorithm to account for the slower systems and slower graphics cards and yet provide as smooth animation as possible. For example the algorithm benchmarks each animation steps and adjusts the animation transitions based on the total animation time alloted and total elapsed time.

There are two visual styles included, Office 2003 and Mozilla style. They can be fully customized.

New TabStrip and TabControl styles

Tab and TabStrip controls now have total of 9 different styles: OneNote, Office 2003, VS2005, VS2005 Dock, VS2005 Document, Round Header, Simulated Theme, Windows XP Theme and Flat.

All of them are available on TabStrip and TabControl. Simulated theme style has additional feature of drawing the tab text horizontally regardless of tab orientation as shown in the picture above. This helps with the readability of the tab text when tabs are docked to the left or right side. Provided is also simulated theme look that will work on any operating system.

Refined designers

Bar, ExplorerBar and SideBar controls have much improved design-time support. Developers in design-time can now simply drag & drop items to change their order. The most beneficial feature though is the ability to drag & drop any windows forms control on any of these controls and have it hosted on them without writing a single line of code.

Intelligent Layout Persistence

SaveLayout and LoadLayout methods are incredibly useful to save and restore the state of the user interface elements that are part of the DotNetBarManager. In past these methods were able to save the position and size of the toolbars, dockable windows etc. but were not able to record state of reordered items on toolbars, menus or dockable windows. The solution was to use the definition persistence methods, but disadvantage of that approach was that you had to delete the custom saved definitions if you decide to add new toolbars or menus to the application.

DotNetBar 5.0 layout persistence methods will now intelligently persist the changes to toolbars, menus and dockable windows and it will restore them even if new toolbars, menus or dockable windows are added. If commands are removed from menus and toolbars and there are references to these commands in the layouts the difference will be handled gracefully and without an exception.

Layout persistence methods can now be used with confidence in their ability to handle changes in your DotNetBarManager definitions.

DotNetBar Suite 5.0 is also compatible with the latest Visual Studio.NET 2005.

DotNetBar Suite 5.0 also includes following controls:

• Fully customizable Menus and Toolbars
• Dockable auto-hide windows with Diamond Docking Hints guides
• Explorer Bar control
• Side Bar control
• Flat Side Bar control
• Tab Strip control
• Balloon Control
• Alert Control
• Balloon-Tip Control
• Navigation Pane control
• Navigation Bar control
• OneNote style Tab Control
• Multi-Functional Panel Control

For more information and fully functional trial version please visit our web site at: http://www.devcomponents.com

Multiple licenses discounts and source code available.

We also provide movie tutorials for many DotNetBar components to help developers jump start their usage of DotNetBar. Please see http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/movies.html for more details.

DevComponents LLC is a developer of professional frameworks and components. Our award winning components and tools are benefiting large corporations, consultants and ISV's all around the world as a cost effective solution for building great applications. Our mission is to provide innovative frameworks and components that help developers build the best applications that today's competitive market place demands.

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