Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Customizing the Ribbon

Ribbon support within a VSTO project is enabled by adding a Ribbon project item to the project. Right-click on the project within Solution Explorer and select Add New Item. In the Add New Item dialog box (see Figure 24.6), you see two different Ribbon templates available for selection: Ribbon (Visual Designer) and Ribbon (XML). As their names suggest, the Visual Designer template provides you with a WYSIWYG design surface for creating your ribbon customizations. Because this design surface can’t be used to build certain types of more advanced Ribbon features, the Ribbon (XML) item template is provided to enable you to handcraft ribbon features in XML. You need to use the Ribbon (XML) item if you want to do any of the following: ...