DotNetJunkie XL on the 7th Floor

Great .NET components, great site design !

By accident, I came across the (greatlooking) site of  Tim Dawson .

He got a great set of free .NET Windows Forms Controls available.
Among those components :

Sandbar

SandBar has a compelling range of features to show off.

• Office 2003 and Office XP style renderers supplied
• Pluggable renderer support for full customisation of appearance
• Toolbars can be rearranged and redocked to any side of your form
• Toolbars can be pulled off the sides and "floated" in any position
• Saving and restoring your users' preferred UI layout is easy with two functions
• Images are supported by binding to ImageLists or direct Icon support (16x16 through 128x128)
• A completely new menubar can be un/redocked like toolbars, and even host controls
• Top-level menu items can be shown as context menus on any control
• All library objects can be inherited to extend their functionality

And at design time...

• Automatic menu system conversion can copy appearance, names and even events of existing menus
• Buttons can be bound to menu items to cut down on repeated code
• In-situ designer support for adding/selecting/configuring toolbar items
• Menu designer offers the same ease-of-use as the framework equivalent, with more capabilities
• All toolbar and menu items support full drag-and-drop
• Configuration of a toolbar's location in a group is made easy

But check also out:

DotNetWidgets
	DotNetWidgets is a set of two components designed to help your application mimic the style of menus and toolbars seen on recent Microsoft products, including Office XP and Visual Studio .NET. DotNetMenuProvider is a component that changes the look of all menus on a form, without the need for any coding, and adds image support. DotNetToolbar is a replacement for the somewhat limited toolbar that ships with the .NET framework, and it features rich design time support as well as being drawn with the stylish Office XP look.

Docking Suite
	This set of controls allows you to quickly and easily set up an interface similar to that of Visual Studio .NET where tool windows are docked to the sides of the main client area. Multiple panels can be docked to any side of the form. Full design-time support is included, and no coding is necessary to configure an advanced window layout. There is no separate editor; windows are laid out visually at design time just like they are at run time. Every docked configuration achievable at runtime is just as easy to set up at design time.

Document Manager
	This control enables you to give your MDI application a newer, "tabbed" feel rather than employing separate windows for each open document. It acts as a host for your documents and gives them an interface like that of Visual Studio .NET. Every document is represented by a tab. You can switch between documents by clicking on their tabs. The behaviour is designed to be identical to that of the interface in Visual Studio .NET - you can "tear" tabs off in to their own tabstrip to split the main window as many times as you like either horizontally or vertically. Ctrl-tab functions the same to switch through the window heirarchy quickly and easily.

Outlook Bar
	OutlookBar is a component designed to look and feel like the navigation bar seen at the left-hand side of Microsoft Outlook XP, and also the toolbox window in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Buttons are drawn and highlighted in the familiar XP style. OutlookBar has a comprehensive range of features to make it not just look like the original, but feel like it too. It supports two styles of slick animation when the user changes category, and is scrollable. Rich design time support is included.

Wizard Control
	WizardControl is a control designed to eliminate the headache of implementing a wizard-based dialog and process in your application. The control is fully customizable, and a great deal of control over the user's progress is available. Featuring rich design-time support, you are able to navigate the wizard much like you can when designing a TabControl. Adding and removing pages is made easy. Guidelines are drawn in the background of pages at design time to help you lay out controls in a consistant manner.