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How do I create an attractive GUI - similar to the one used for Microsoft Office - in C#?

I will be using Winforms and C#.

James
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DucDigital
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  • Are you using WinForms or WPF? – Cody Gray - on strike Feb 19 '11 at 11:04
  • How about starting with some books on UX? – David Heffernan Feb 19 '11 at 11:07
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    A generic question like this is quite useless. You could ask "is there anyway I can create a better car like the Ferrari?". You shoud begin designing your car and then watching who is doing the "right" component for your car. You can buy "controls", but you can't but "interfaces" (technically you can, but they won't solve all your problems). If you ask "what is the best grid for WPF", then THAT is an intelligent question. And then, Word is an editor. Are you doing an editor? Excel is a spreadsheet, are you doing a spreadsheet? – xanatos Feb 19 '11 at 11:09
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    @xanatos: Presumably, the asker means "what type of controls do I need to use to create a user interface like Microsoft Office, and where can I obtain them?" Whether (s)he knows it yet or not. – Cody Gray - on strike Feb 19 '11 at 11:12
  • What sort of application are you trying to create? – Richard Ev Feb 19 '11 at 11:14
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    @xanatos: agree , @Cody: If yes, then let him rephrase his question. – Euphoric Feb 19 '11 at 11:48

5 Answers5

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WPF is a good place to start. Also you may checkout this blog post which illustrates how to create an Office like Ribbon in WPF.

Darin Dimitrov
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Take a look at Krypton - It is a Free Winforms Skinner (Themer) that gives a cool look without too much effort. All you need to do is use their controls (which are extended from the basic Winforms Controls and have the same properties / methods events.

Vishnoo Rath
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There are many rich controls collections, some free, some that need payment (devexpress.com for example).

You want it for WinForms, for Silverlight, for WPF, for ASP.NET? (devexpress has all of them).

If you want something "free", there are toolkits for WPF and Silverlight on codeplex.

xanatos
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Do you want to emulate the Office 2007/2010 ribbon?

Codeplex has a WinForms ribbon control you might like at http://ribbon.codeplex.com/.

See also Ribbon UI Control for WinForms

Community
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Richard Ev
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The visual part of Office that I see most people emulating is the ribbon control. Here's info on an example like it.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/ribboncontrol.aspx

Bob G
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