Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms

January 23, 2004 @ 1:38 am

I’ve been taking a look at a number of UI Widget control libraries recently for my Windows Forms apps. I’ve been pretty disappointed by the stuff that ships in the box in .Net - specifically menus and toolbars are stuck in ancient times and don’t really measure up to modern UI guidelines. WinForms Toolbars too have so many quirks that make them next to unusable.

So, for the last month or so I’ve been looking at a number of UI libraries and have played with them off an on in a few of my smaller apps I’m working on. Most of them work well and provide the look and feel that I’m after (OfficeXp or 2003). However, I’ve been having a few issues with most them:

Licensing

Some vendors are very strict about what they’re tools can be used with. DataDynamics goes as far as saying you can’t use their controls (and ActiveReports too) for developer tools! Period. Since I’m building mostly tools these days it sure helps to have something that you can distribute often with source code (by pointing at a demo version at least).

Size

Most will add at least 1 meg of DLL(s) to your application. I’ve also noticed some controls generate a huge amount of code for each widget that gets dumped. Although flexible in many cases the pure featurism of these controls is setting a huge number of settings at startup.

Speed

Most of the tools I’ve tried feel really slow. I have a couple of forms with some moderately complex toolbars/menus and these forms are just dead slow presumably due to the toolbar stuff. Especially startup speed is very bad with some of these controls as they are apparently are loading a huge amount of runtime stuff that the JIT compiles. Speed is a big issue also in the development environment.

Designer
Most tools use a custom designer interface to create their toolbars and menus and these things invariably feel very clumsy and user unfriendly. Most are hierarchical in layout and use a tree or multiple trees to allow attaching of items. Call me picky but that UI is horrible for building a layout.

SandBar to the rescue

However today I found a nice surprise: While looking over the source of RSSBandit I noticed that they are using a library called Sandbar from www.divil.co.uk. I was pleasantly surprised by this library which is very clean and light in design and addresses most of the things I found lacking elsewhere. SandBar is only one of a few components available (Docking Suite, EyeFinder (new Outlook bar) being a couple of others) but the nice thing is that these things are relatively small and modular. And in my preliminary testing I found that they are also very light in memory usage and are by far the fastest controls I’ve used (menus actually pop up immediately on first open instead of the 1 sec+ hesitation with others).

The designer is also nice – because there is no designer. You simply drop controls on your toolbars and menus work just like the WinForm menu designer. And best of all it is priced reasonably (free for GPL licensing and very reasonable pricing for commercial use) as you can buy only what you need instead of a whole UI pack which is often overkill.

From the use I’ve made of it through the day today I can say that Sandbar does not have the feature breadth of some of the other products – it’s much leaner though and it provides the core functionality that you really need easily.

I'm sure there are probably a few other libraries that I don't know about. Maybe some others can be pointed out.

Here's what I tried:

SharpUI

ComponentOne Studio

DotNetBar

SandBar

Feedback for this Weblog Entry

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by chris jefferies January 23, 2004 @ 10:21 am

Just now I was over there looking at the EyeFinder control. Very nice.

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by Rick Strahl January 23, 2004 @ 3:06 pm

I spend some time today to rip out SharpUI out of the Web Store client app and add in Sandbar instead. All I can say is WOW! The difference in performance is incredible. The app before was nearly intolerable to let load up. Now it is acceptable although still sluggish. And the toolbars look cleaner to boot. Still have a few minor issues with click handlers to work out, but otherwise this was a smooth transition.

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by Issam Elbaytam January 23, 2004 @ 7:54 pm

The licensing clause in our products is to prevent users from using our own product to compete with us. We market to developers and have a very easy redistribution royalty-free policy for those developers to license their applications to their end users as a special purpose application. Imagine if someline like MS or Borland bought a copy of AR and was allowed to distribute it as part of their IDE, that we kill our market. Or if someone takes AR and compiles one of our samples and resells it as a reporting tool that competes directly with us. We decided to put such a clause in our license to get developers to talk to us if they have a special need. If you have any questions and are still interested in using our components please send us and email and we'll discuss those needs with you. AFAIK, you have used ActiveBar in WestWind help without any problems.

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by Rick Strahl January 23, 2004 @ 11:01 pm

Hi Isssam, and thanks for taking the time to respond. There are a couple of issues with this - first the phrasing of the license agreement is very vague and sounds very strict/harsh. Development Tools can mean a whole lot of things. I understand your need to protect yourself very well, having built tools to sell myself, but I think the case you're making here is pretty much self-explanatory and there's no chance that a standard license agreement would allow for integration of the tool as development engine inside of a dev tool like VS, or C# Builder etc. However, it gets very grey when you talk about general developer tools. If I build a small builder of some sort and want to include say SharpUi controls, that license agreement tells me that I can't use it. If I build a product that is essentailly a developer tool but it has one part that requires reporting (not report design though) that license agreement tells me that I can't use it. If I build anything that distributes source code, that agreement does not let me distribute the controls. None of these operations would be anything to compete with your products but I think these would not be allowed under the way the license agreement reads.

Again, I can see your point in protection here, not just against the obvious dev tools, but also against people just using the controls without paying for a license. However, if the latter is something you worry about there's really no good protection against that since there's a good chance your tools are already installed on many machines anyway. Maybe a clarification in the license agreements would be in order? What do you think?

BTW, I've used DataDynamics controls for a long time and have been a very happy customer. I love ActiveReports and SharpUI is great too if a little bloated and in need of some tuning still. I've used ActiveBar for years with Visual FoxPro and have promoted it to all those that asked whether my apps were FoxPro apps :-}. Your products have always been top notch and support is downright awesome. But when I looked at that license agreement I got immediately worried because you basically describe my market for most things that I do sell.

I'm no lawyer, but my philosophy has always been that it's better to be lenient than to bark to hard and give the impression of a total lockdown when that really can backfire. Most people do the right thing - the ones that don't wouldn't pay anyway...

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by Issam Elbaytam January 24, 2004 @ 6:54 pm

I will discuss changing the agreement with the rest of the team.

To clarify the language, when a user licenses our products that gives him/her the right to distribute the product with his applications and that re-distribution right does not extend any further to any of his/her users.

We are currently looking at simplifying the licensing scheme further in future versions and will move towards clarifying the language in the license agreement.

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by dartrax October 21, 2004 @ 7:03 am

Hello, i also tried SandBar and SandDock. But i have a large application and must say, it is very slow in resizing! It takes up to 4 seconds to reorganize when resizing the applicationwindow from the whole screen to half the width. I use Dacris NETXP 3.0 now (www.dacris.de) and it's much faster then divil!

dartrax

re: Of Toolbar and UI Widget controls for Windows Forms
by dartrax December 16, 2004 @ 11:02 am

Hello, i'm again ;-)

What i've said in my last post is wrong. I thaught SandBar and SandDock is slow because i changed the opacity-Value of my form on loading and that causes a very slow UI with both, devil and dacris.

dartrax