We’ve very excited to announce our new WPF Bars product that has been in development for quite a while now. Bars comes packed with everything you need to implement advanced ribbons, toolbars, and menus in your WPF applications.

This first beta release of Bars includes a powerful new Ribbon control that has the latest Office appearance with subtle animations, is extremely customizable, and makes it easy to build custom galleries. A StandaloneToolBar control can be used as a window's main toolbar or can be enclosed within a tool window. Future planned updates for Bars will add docking toolbar functionality. Everything from popup/split buttons to comboboxes to galleries can be included anywhere in a ribbon, toolbar, or menu.

An open source Bars MVVM library implements a complete set of view models and related UI views for building a full ribbon hierarchy in code. It also includes multiple examples of building visually stunning galleries that are seen in Office.

The new Ribbon control implementation in Bars was built from the ground up with WPF best-practices in mind. It supports MVVM usage, has fluent animation throughout, allows instant switching between Classic (three row) and Simplified (modern single row) layout modes, uses simple control variant logic when resizing, has better a control infrastructure, includes a full UIA peer tree, and that’s just scratching the surface.

We think you will love using the new Bars product in your WPF applications, and we can use your help. Bars will ship in the WPF Controls v23.1 release and we are nearing release candidate stability for the product. We would like to have additional customers take it for a test drive to provide us feedback.

If you would like to assist in testing a preview build of Bars in v23.1, please write us at our support e-address and describe how you might use Bars in your applications.  We look forward to hearing from you.

This version contains updates across all our WinForms controls to support high DPI environments and add new dark color schemes.  .NET version compatibility was modernized to the latest supported .NET versions, and a large number of other various feature additions and bug fixes were made to all products.

See the related announcement post for the detailed list of enhancements and updates.

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Here's a look at some of the new features.

DPI Awareness

Historically, high DPI support in WinForms has been a mixed bag. Newer Windows API’s and recent updates to .NET have greatly improved the scenario, but high DPI support is still not free and developers must put in the effort to ensure proper DPI awareness.

With our WinForms Controls v23.1 updates, we’ve done our part to make sure our controls can render correctly in high DPI environments. Some of the changes include:

• Scale font sizes.
• Scale control dimensions.
• Scale glyphs.
• Scale raster images using optimal technique for the scale factor (e.g., pixel doubling at 200% dpi).
• Scale built-in dialogs.
• New vector-based common images for SyntaxEditor IntelliPrompt.
• New DPI-friendly dock guides for Docking.
• New DpiHelper class to simplify scaling based on DPI.
• Updated Sample Browser to be DPI-aware.

NOTE:  Anyone with a DPI-aware application needs to read our v23.1 conversion topic and thoroughly test. It could be that you were already compensating for lack of DPI-awareness that we now handle, so you don't want to do something like scale our controls if we're already scaling them (causing double scaling).

Dark Color Scheme

We’ve also revamped how all renderers determine which colors are being used so we can better support a dark color scheme. New “Metro Dark” renderers are available for all our products and can be used to better integrate with dark-themed applications.

.NET Compatibility Updates

In regards to .NET version compatibility, we have:

• Validated that v23.1 works great with .NET 7.
• Updated our .NET 5 targets to .NET 6, since that is the lowest supported version of .NET per Microsoft.
• Updated our .NET Framework 4.0 targets to .NET Framework 4.6.2, since that is the lowest supported version of .NET Framework per Microsoft.

The WinForms Controls v23.1 release is close to ready, and includes sweeping changes across all products to support high DPI environments and new dark color schemes. We have extensively tested this release internally and have already received positive feedback from beta testers, but we know every customer’s implementation of DPI support can vary greatly and would like to get more exposure before full release.

If you would like to assist with evaluating the release (especially DPI awareness) in your own application and provide feedback on changes before release, please email our support address for access to a release candidate.

DPI Awareness

Historically, high DPI support in WinForms has been a mixed bag. Newer Windows API’s and recent updates to .NET have greatly improved the scenario, but high DPI support is still not free and developers must put in the effort to ensure proper DPI awareness.

With our WinForms Controls v23.1 updates, we’ve done our part to make sure our controls can render correctly in high DPI environments. Some of the changes coming in the next release include:

• Scale font sizes.
• Scale control dimensions.
• Scale glyphs.
• Scale raster images using optimal technique for the scale factor (e.g., pixel doubling at 200% dpi).
• Scale built-in dialogs.
• New vector-based common images for SyntaxEditor IntelliPrompt.
• New DPI-friendly dock guides for Docking.
• New DpiHelper class to simplify scaling based on DPI.
• Updated Sample Browser to be DPI-aware.

Dark Color Scheme

We’ve also revamped how all renderers determine which colors are being used so we can better support a dark color scheme. New “Metro Dark” renderers are available for all our products and can be used to better integrate with dark-themed applications.