The past few days, we’ve been showing some preview screenshots of the upcoming Backstage functionality (Office 2010-like application menu) being added for the next Ribbon for WPF build. Check out the prior posts if you haven’t already seen them:
Today I’d like to show off some more related features that have been added. Let’s take a look at the Office 2010 Black theme, with the Backstage application menu open to the Send & Save tab:
Backstage is a new control that represents the entire application menu area pictured above. It is effectively a TabControl that knows how to display buttons, recent documents, separators, and tabs in its header area. The Info, Recent, etc. tabs are new BackstageTab controls.
When a BackstageTab is selected, it gets the blue highlight seen in the Send & Save tab above. The tab’s content area is displayed on the right side. In this screenshot we actually have a secondary level of tabs too. The Send Using E-mail selected item is really a tab (new TaskTabItem control) that is within a new TaskTabControl control. This control knows how to embed ribbon Separator controls in with the tabs so that tab groups like Save & Send and File Types can be created.
On the far right column, we have another built-in style that can be applied to ribbon Separator controls, the same one that gets used when the Separator is in a TaskTabControl. Below that is a new style for ribbon Buttons where they render in a large rectangular format.
All of these new controls and styles have been carefully crafted to allow you to create a stunning Backstage menu in your own applications. Most other vendors don’t even offer Backstage, and if so, offer bare minimum features. As we’ve seen, our Backstage implementation looks like the real thing, supports recent document management, allows multiple tab levels, and has control styles that match Office.
These updates should be ready to go live very soon.