It would not be a Krypton component if you could not alter the appearance quickly and easily. For each collection of menu items you can turn off the image column by setting the ImageColumn property to False…

And by then providing some large images you get something similar to the menu part of the ribbon application menu from Office 2007…

The above images use the default setting of Standard for the collections ItemStyle property. If you select the Alternate setting instead then the text part of the menu items is shown in bold for the Text and normal for the ExtraText. Useful if you want to display additional information about the option…

Combine the Alternate setting and ImageColumn turned off and you can create a nice looking menu that gives the user more extensive information and feedback about state…

The Text and ExtraText can extend over multiple lines if you require particularly long descriptions. This should allow you to create the kind of appearance you need for most situations without having to alter palette settings manually.

The core of the context menu is the ability to add a collection of menu items that represent individual options. For each item you can define the image, text, checked state, enabled state, shortcut information and a collection of child items. From this it then draws the menu item in the familiar way…

By adding header items we can give a nice description to a group of menu options. Use the separator item for a more subtle visual break as shown between the ‘Third’ and ‘Search’ items above.

Next up is a separator entry that allows you to specify a vertical or horizontal break. In the following pictures you can see that I have a heading called Heading that is followed by a vertical break. This causes a second column to be created that itself has a heading entry called Another. Below this are a couple of horizontal break entries. 

Well I promised it would get more interesting and so it has. Just barely. You can now add heading entries so that areas of the context menu can be given meaning titles. You can specify a Text, ExtraText and Image for the heading entry. Here is how it looks for some of the different built in palettes… 

As you have already guessed from the title I am now working on creating a context menu capability for the Toolkit.

 This is what I have so far….

Not quite completed! As I have not blogged for a couple of weeks so I thought it was time for an update. I have only been working on the control for one day and so only have a simple popup window to show. The intention is to provide richer and more flexible functionality than the standard Windows.Forms context menu.

Once completed the same functionality will be reused to create the application menu on the Ribbon and popup windows for the galleries. I will try and provide some regular updates so you can see progress as it happens. I promise future pictures will be a little more interesting!