This massive release contains our new Bars product with modern ribbon, toolbar, menu and related control implementations that allow you to replicate Office-like user interfaces, right in your Avalonia applications.  Numerous enhancements were made to add support for template-based icons in our controls.  And finally, the Actipro native control themes were updated to be compatible with Avalonia v11.2.

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.

Ribbons, ToolBars, Menus

Ribbon Variant Sizing

Ribbon consolidates all commands into a single location, which is easy to use and scales well, thereby providing fast access to all commands regardless of window size. The entire layout of child controls can be tailored to ensure the most important commands are prominently available. Through the use of variant layout phases, you can achieve nearly any dynamic layout that you find in Office.

Ribbon Classic and Simplified Layout Modes

Classic layout mode uses a taller ribbon with a combination of large buttons and multi-row groups of controls and is ideal for large applications with lots of commands. Whereas Simplified layout mode is a modern refinement that uses a single row of controls and supports overflow. Ribbon can instantly toggle between the two modes.

Color Galleries

Show color palettes using the many available gallery display options. Colors can be categorized, and color shades can be generated.

Other Galleries

Galleries can appear on ribbons or menus, and can custom render items to show anything from bullets or symbols to text styles.

Screen Tips

Screen tips are advanced tool tips with a standardized layout for bar controls, and intelligently display below the ribbon.

Key Tips

Key tips provide easy keyboard access to any control on the ribbon or in its popups, even on backstage.

Backstage

The ribbon File button's backstage consists of application-wide commands such as for file operations and other functionality like printing.

UI Density

The user interface can switch between compact (seen here), normal, and spacious densities. Spacious densities are more touch friendly.

Standalone Toolbars

A standalone toolbar control is flexible enough to be used in several contexts and can host any of the galleries or controls that are used in a ribbon. Overflowed controls display in a popup.

Complete MVVM Support

Optionally create the entire ribbon user interface via MVVM. An open-source companion MVVM library is available that provides a full set of view models and related UI bindings for all bar controls.

Icon Updates

Avalonia has several icon libraries available where the icons are implemented via an Object and IDataTemplate pair instead of via a single IImage. Using these sorts of icons in our Avalonia controls in the past was difficult due to some of our icon properties being declared as IImage.

We’ve added a new IconPresenter control that is now used in control templates throughout our products.  IconPresenter supports Object-based icon data and an IDataTemplate that can render that icon data.  This mechanism is customizable so that it can work with any third-party icon library.  All our controls have been updated to support these kinds of icons, while still supporting IImage-based icons out of the box.

Avalonia v11.2 Compatibility

The recent Avalonia 11.2 version made several breaking changes to their native control templates.  The free Actipro Themes for native Avalonia controls have been updated to adapt and be fully compatible with those changes.