Ribbon backstage support

Hi Yossi,

1) WPF Studio 2010.2, which we are working to have out in the next couple weeks, will have Office 2010 themes. Backstage didn't make the cut for the first build. It will be one of the new features we work on after the first 2010.2 build. We didn't want to hold back 2010.2 any longer since it's a very major release for us with a ton of updates across multiple products.

2) It's rendered using brushes that you can override. If you are a WPF Studio customer you can download the default XAML styles/templates from your account and clone/modify the brushes for the application button in your Application.Resources. The Theme Browser in the Sample Browser also lets you see all the brushes.

3) We just added the toggle minimization button to Ribbon 2010.2's codebase today as a new control. See our latest blog post for a screenshot.

Regarding the backstage: Could we get any more information on its availability? It is definitely going to make it into the next build, and what is the timeframe? Is ther any chance you could give us an idea on which features it will contain? Any more information would be very helpful to us in planning for our application development. Thanks in advance.

Hi Martin,

We finished off Ribbon updates today and are doing some finalizations to the other products so that we can hopefully ship WPF Studio 2010.2 in the next several days. As mentioned above, the first 2010.2 release won't have backstage because we didn't want to hold 2010.2 back any longer, however it will have full Office 2010 theme support.

Backstage is one of the things we'll be working on right after its release since we know customers who move to Office 2010 styles want it. So our goal is to have it appear in a maintenance release or two after the first 2010.2 build.

If you could post a list of features you'd like to see in it, that would definitely be helpful when we start our design work on it. Now is the time to contribute ideas for it.

Thank you very much for the quick response! Here is a list of features that we are looking for.

In general we want the backstage to closely mimic the controls and tabs you see in Microsoft Office 2010 products.

High priority:
- Recent Document Tab: Both Recent Documents and Recent Places if possible.
- Print tab: As similar as possible to the one in Microsoft Word. If we could get a tab with all of the print options by default, and then just be responsible for filling the content of the preview window that would be very helpful.
- Standard set of controls for backstage tabs. For example: Some sort of Button control that allows you to set the image, header, and description (much like the Info tab on Microsoft Word 2010: Permissions, Prepare for Sharing and Versions buttons). Ideally this would also allow grouping and insert the header and dotted line separators.
- Fast command buttons in the main tab (i.e. Save, Save As, Open and Close in Microsoft Office Word 2010).

Medium priority:
- Ability to customize background image
- Screen tips
- Key tips

Low priority:
- Ability to navigate through backstage tabs. For example, if you click on a button inside of a tab it takes you to another screen, and you get navigation arrows at the top left of the tab so you can navigate back to the previous screen. See the "New" tab in Microsoft Word 2010 for an example.
- Most recently used files

I am guessing some of these may be already on your radar but wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything. If you have any questions about any of these or need further clarification just let me know. Thanks again, looking forward to your 2010.2 release!

[Modified at 09/22/2010 03:35 PM]

[Modified at 09/22/2010 03:35 PM]

I would like to see the BackstageView control available as a stand-alone control, so it is not built-in to the Ribbon Bar.

I am not using the Ribbon Bar, but I have an Office-like orb in the upped left of my main window. When pressed, I would like it to open a BackstageView. So I will show the control myself, but it won't be associated with any Ribbon Bar.

Hi Jim,

Right now the design we've taken so far (still work in progress) is to just style a ribbon:ApplicationMenu differently when it is in backstage mode. ribbon:ApplicationMenu is a control so it should be able to be used standalone.

Hi,

Someone above posted the following:

Quote:
Low priority:
- Ability to navigate through backstage tabs. For example, if you click on a button inside of a tab it takes you to another screen, and you get navigation arrows at the top left of the tab so you can navigate back to the previous screen. See the "New" tab in Microsoft Word 2010 for an example.

This 'New' tab from Word 2010 is the exact thing that I am after. I have managed the styling of it. But now my developer is trying to bind it and make it actually work, but he is finding that the default ribbon buttons with in the backstage have a click event to close the backstage by default.

So my question is, has the above feature been implemented in the latest release? If not, how can we make it ourselves (how to turn off the default click event so that we can navigate to different content with in the backstage?)?

Cheers

Hi Aimee,

I believe that you can set ribbon:Button.StaysOpenOnClick="True" to prevent the Backstage from closing on clicks.

No we don't have any new Backstage controls implemented like what you are describing.

Hi Aimee,

I believe that you can set ribbon:Button.StaysOpenOnClick="True" to prevent the Backstage from closing on clicks.

No we don't have any new Backstage controls implemented like what you are describing.

Thanks for you help. That was basically what I was after to be able to make our custom 'New' tab.

Many thanks for your help.