Future of the WPF Ribbon

I’m sure many of you are wondering what the future of the WPF Ribbon will look like. The future is hard to predict and there are so many things that can change. But here is a short list of things we will be looking into for the future of the WPF Ribbon.

  • Virtualization – We are looking at the virtualization pattern for WPF Ribbon as we think it will work well for developers that have many commands they would like to make available to their users.
  • Improvements on Galleries – We are also investigating improving the galleries we already have in the WPF Ribbon as well as looking at including galleries in the in ribbon and not just in drop down ribbon controls.
  • And many other improvements suggestions from our customers, so keep the ideas coming.

As to the future of the Ribbon as a control… We are not 100% certain as nothing has been set in stone as of yet.  I will say that our current thinking is that WPF Ribbon will follow the same path as the WPF DataGrid control.

The WPF DataGrid was initially released as a standalone control separate from the .NET Framework. After its initial release, the WPF DataGrid was updated a couple of times with bug fixes and improvements to its functionality. Then, with our latest release, the WPF DataGrid was made part of the .NET Framework, where it lives today.

The WPF Ribbon will probably follow the same path. Our initial release of the WPF Ribbon was back in July of this year. We are doing our first update to the WPF Ribbon this month, October. We will provide another update to the WPF Ribbon sometime next year. Then we anticipate making the WPF Ribbon part of the .NET Framework with our next major release.

Thanks!
WPF Ribbon Team