Introducing the Ribbon Framework
The Windows Ribbon control is a COM control and since it has a user interface you must initialize an STA (single threaded) apartment. The Windows Ribbon control is not an ActiveX control. This means that you do not have to provide an ActiveX control site, which simplifies considerably the code that you have to write in your application.
The Ribbon control uses adaptive layout. This means that the developer provides information about the controls that will be used and how they will be grouped, and at run time the Ribbon control determines the actual position of the controls.
To see the effect of adaptive layout you can run Windows 7 Paint and resize the window. This is shown in Figure 1. The top left image shows the Ribbon control with the View tab selected. At this width the items on the Ribbon control are shown full size. When the window width is reduced, the Ribbon control width is reduced and adaptive layout resizes the controls to enable all of them to be shown.
The bottom left image in Figure 1 shows the first change, that the Zoom group has compacted from a row of three buttons to a column of buttons. When the width is reduced further (bottom right, Figure 1) the Display group collapses to a column of buttons. At this size, there is no space to show the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button on the title bar, so instead there is a single button labeled .. and when you click on this button the toolbar pops up. The most compact arrangement (top right, Figure 1) collapses the Zoom group to a drop-down menu. If the window width is reduced further, the items on the Ribbon control cannot be shown and it disappears completely.
