Office 2007 Style

When I wrote the last post, I did not pay attention to the author of this article. Yes, dear Phil creates a complete free suite of .NET components named Krypton Toolkit. So what is Krypton Toolkit?

http://www.componentfactory.com/

Let me start with Microsoft Office 2007. In a few old posts I told about the so called Ribbon or Fluent UI. In fact, Microsoft only uses Fluent UI in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Although Visio 2007 is part of Office, it remains the menu and bar style.

So in all Office 2007 has two styles. For my project at home, Fluent is not a suitable choice. So right now I think I can choose the other.

And Krypton Toolkit is just for my case. With it is quite easy to move a normal application to this style. The steps are,

1. Install Krypton Toolkit.
2. In VS, drag a KryptonManager onto your main form.
3. Set the KrytonManager properties right.
4. Rebuild your project and see the effect.

You can further extend the style by doing the following,

• Set your StatusStrip RenderMode from System to ManagerRenderMode.
• Open the form source code, change the base class from Form to KryptonForm.

Why a KryptonManager can do so much? I guess it overrides ToolStripManager so as to render the strips that beautiful. Please notice that Krypton is even free for commercial projects so why not give it a try?

BTW, the only issue you might notice is that such kind of free components are not suitable to open source projects, such as Code Beautifier Collection. I strongly recommend you use open source code in open source projects.

You do not need to get a Fluent license from Microsoft if you use Krypton Toolkit. That license only affects Krypton Ribbon users. This is my understanding, and you can consult Krypton’s vendor on licensing questions.