The final touches have been made and the design time experience completed for the initial release.
For most of the ribbon elements you can use the left mouse click to select and edit the properties in the properties window. So if you left click a tab you can alter the tab properties as seen here.
This is true for the tab, group, group triple, group lines, group sepatator, cluster, button and label elements. Each of these also has a set of verbs. Verbs are the hyperlink style commands at the bottom of the properties window. They are useful for one click actions that alter the element.
For the above tab element it has entries for moving the tab left and right to change its ordering, for adding a new group inside the tab and for deleting the tab entirely.
There is however a quicker way to access the same set of verbs. Just right click the element and use the context menu that is displayed. Here is the context menu from right clicking a tab…
The context menus have additional options beyond the verbs. For the tab it has a Visible check item you can select to switch runtime visibility. If you right click a group…
A group has extra options for Visible, Allow Collapsed and Dialog Launcher. The Allow Collapsed determines if at runtime the group can be collapsed to just a button that shows a popup of the group contents. Dialog Launcher determines if the small button on the bottom right of the group is present for initiating a modal dialog box.
Here is a button element context menu…
Here you have Visible, Enabled, Checked and Type. The Checked property is only used by the button when the Type is defined as Check. Use the Type submenu to alter the button operation from the default of Push.
The combination of left click for selection, right click for context menus and helper elements for creating new objects should make the design time experience quick and simple.
