Office 2003 Menus

• Download demo project - 20.8 KB
• Download source - 51 KB

Introduction

Just with one Single Line of code, you can change the look of all Menus and Context menus of your Windows Forms Project to look just like the menus shipped with Office 2003. Also, you can add Icons to your menus with a single line of code. There is one more feature in this component, You can simply call the method End to change the menus to its original look.

Using the Code

To use the Component, first, add the component to the Toolbox, and then drag it to the form, and then just call this method:

// To start showing the Office 2003 Menus
OfficeMenus1.Start( FormName );

Also, you can change the look of the menus to its original look by calling this method:

// to change the look of the menus to its original "classic" look
OfficeMenus1.End();

Adding Icons to Menu Items is very simple. Just add an ImageList to your project, and then change the ImageList property of your OfficeMenu Component to the ImageList you wish to use, and then use this code:

// Adding a picture to your Menus
// OfficeMenus.AddPicture( MenuItem MenuItemToAddPictureTo, int ImageIndex );
OfficeMenus1.ImageList = imageList1;
OfficeMenus1.AddPicture(menuItem2, 1);

Points of Interest

I was so confused about the way in which I will add pictures to menus, so I decided to add a collection of type NameValueCollection, and when we call the method AddPicture, it will add the Handle of the menu and the Image index to that Collection, and when we want to retrieve the image of a menu, we search this collection for the handle of the menu, if found, it returns the picture, otherwise it returns null. Check the code for more information. BTW, the code is well commented.

18^th October, 2006: There is a problem when using this control under MDI application, the menuitem added by MDI application automatically can't take effect.

License

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