Silverlight OOB User Menu Control

Question

Well ... at the risk of sounding like I really don't know anything about programming, I have a question about controls in Silverlight 5.

I have an OOB App that I am working with, but I need to add the User Menus (File, Edit, etc.) that are normally seen at the top of all apps. There used to be a control in VS (the Menu control) that was easily configurable. What is the control used to create the User Menus in Silverlight 5? The Context Menu is not what I am asking about. That is the right mouse click menu ... so that's not the answer ...

Please, understand my problem. It's been since Silverlight 2 since I worked in Silverlight. I appreciate any information you kind folks would be willing to provide.

Answer 1

There is no such thing available directly from Microsoft (meaning it's neither built-in or present in the Silverlight Toolkit).

You will have to use third-party controls such as DevExpress or Telerik.

EDIT: Some more advice in response to your comment.

Another possibility is to create UIs from scratch. There are two forms of UIs that I found inspiring lately, both of which don't use any ribbons or drop-down menues at all. The first is to use "Windows 8"-like dashboards instead of traditional menues, the other is the Windows Azure Management Portal (a web application).

I don't use traditional UI frameworks for menues myself, but mostly because I don't like those approaches and I'm picky with how user interfaces should work and look like.

But obviously you have to make a serious time investment to go new ways. And it will heavily depend on your application what approach makes sense.

Here's one simple approach that could work in a number of cases, I used it for a database application (I call it the Windows-Phone-7/8 approach):

The screen is divided into the "page" area and information bars. The information bars contain no menues, just who's logged on, a back-button, a home-button, and context-sensitive buttons depending on what's in the view. So basically it behaves like a web browser and you navigate through the app by clicking on "links" (buttons that take you elsewhere).

There's only one page area, so no windows and no popups. I've gone to the extreme of making even dialog windows to be pages.

Now you need menues. You do that with "dashboards", ie. pages that present some overview stuff and buttons that lead to the other areas of your application.

Although you could have action buttons like save or delete on the page itself, I put them in the bottom bar (but they are still dependent on the page your on) - that is exactly how it works in Windows Phone 7/8.

One last advice: The real effort is usually not in the menus anyway. Beside your application logic itself, it's a lot of little things like login screen, error handling and how to present error messages (look at the windows azure management portal for how they did that really nicely) and gracefully failing on session timeout. There's also a lot of nuisance on how you manage your data (ria-services, etc.).

So as long as you don't need fancy data grid grouping, rich-text edit or excel-like pivot controls, a toolkit might not help you as much as you'd hope - because they give you only the controls, not the entire UI.