Context menus pop-up with a list of choices or commands appropriate for what the user is currently trying to do, often in response to the user pressing their off-hand mouse button (typically, their right mouse button).  The data menu control can present such context menus, and do a good job at it.  Shown here, a Hedge Fund Manager overseeing billions of dollars in assets is exploring his appetite for risk in the current financial markets.  What will your users use the context menu for?

Change the orientation of the ASP.NET AJAX data menu control to Horizontal when you want to create customary strip-style menu bars where submenus cascade down as shown here in this screenshot.

Assign images to the items you display with the WebDataMenu™ control to supplement their meaning (i.e., with a mnemonic icon), to reinforce your corporate brand (i.e., as with a logo), or to enhance your user's experience in many other ways.

Building on the roles-based UI styling capabilities of the Application Styling Framework™, the ASP.NET AJAX data menu control can have its look and feel totally customized as shown by these four different examples of "style sets." Using the included NetAdvantage AppStylist® tool for ASP.NET, you can design your own style sets, or you can choose from the professionally-designed style sets that have been included for your convenience.

Imagine the possibilities of a data menu control whose items are completely templatable. That is what the WebDataMenu™ gives you.  Users of this Web-based library materials browser are rewarded by the exciting page pictures they can see to navigate to the proper pages (these could also be thumbnail previews, or book covers). This makes you application so much more compelling than an ordinary litany of page indices.

Menu items in the data menu control can display helpful tool tips to the user, and this is particularly useful if you are only showing an iconic image for the menu item (for example, when you want to create a toolbar or tools palette UI).  By default, the tool tip text is the same as the menu item's text as shown here for "Windows Forms Home."

Setting the ASP.NET AJAX data menu control's Orientation property to Vertical will give you a menu that fits snuggly to the left or right edge of the page.  In this screenshot of an online retail sales application, the data menu appears perfectly in place along the left edge of a WebDialogWindow™, displaying its submenus to the right.