WPF Outlook Bar Control
Microsoft's Outlook navigation bar has become a pivotal part of today's user interfaces and a staple of modern line of business applications. With the introduction of xamOutlookBar™ to your Visual Studio® 2008 toolbox, you can easily drag-and-drop this common UI control into your own Windows® Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications.
A Pattern for Streamlined Navigation
With the xamOutlookBar you have several groups, each group being a headered content control that can display the arbitrary WPF controls it contains when selected by your users. Whenever a group is not selected, it resides in the Outlook group bar, which contains a group presenter responsible for displaying headers of recently used groups plus a group overflow area that dynamically manages any groups in excess of what can be displayed by the group presenter. xamOutlookBar takes care of all of the behavior related to selecting groups, moving groups to the overflow area, etc., leaving your users with a crisp and clean navigation experience.
Key Features at a Glance
- Group Organization – Quickly organize groups in Visual Studio® 2008 with productivity-enhancing smart tag actions that enable easily adding groups with common features like tree views, calendars and grid layouts.
- Collapsible – Users can at any time collapse the xamOutlookBar so that it retracts to a vertical bar, yielding maximum space to your application.
- Dynamic Overflow – When groups exceed the space available to them in the Outlook group bar, the UI they require can compress to as small as an iconic image.
- Splitter Separator – Users can govern how much space the xamOutlookBar's selected group content receives by using the group area splitter bar dividing the selected group content from the groups presenter.