4.4 Office-Style Menus and Toolbars

The Microsoft Office suite provides menus and toolbars that are a little different from the standard ones. Menu items have icons next to them, usually matching the icons used in the toolbar. The latest versions have the new "flat" look. (Menus don't have the raised border, nor do toolbar buttons, even when highlighted.) The menus themselves are on toolbars that can be dragged around, and items can even be dragged between the menu bar and other toolbars.

A commonly asked question is: can I get Office-style menus and toolbars with Windows Forms? Unfortunately, at the time this book went to press, the answer was no. Currently, the only two options are to recreate the behavior of Office menus and toolbars yourself, or to buy a third-party component to supply this behavior. Writing this behavior from scratch is nontrivial—you can get part of the way there by using owner-drawn menus, but you would still need to write a completely new toolbar.

For some reason, the development tools have always provided menu and toolbar support that is at least one generation behind the menu system used by the development environment itself. This is still true with Visual Studio .NET 2003—the IDE has Office-style toolbars, and yet provides no easy way of adding these to your own applications. With luck, this will be addressed in a future version of the tools.