Ribbon in WinForms C# .Net 4.0

Microsoft makes one for WPF that you can download here.

There is an open source ribbon that should work for traditional WinForms.


Microsoft have made a bit of a mess of providing a Ribbon control. Initially it had some very complex licence conditions, these may be relaxed now but the control is not as easily available as some of their recent NuGet deployed goodies.

There seem to be more options in the WPF area if that helps:

  1. WPF - Microsoft Ribbon for WPF October 2010, this replacesWPF Ribbon Preview
  2. New .NET 4.5 WPF Ribbon - RC but at least it is in the framework
  3. Fluent Ribbon Control Suite

In general, WinForms seems to be a dead-end and I wouldn't expect to see Microsoft invest too much in it but libraries/examples do exist:

  1. Commercial library: ComponentOne Ribbon
  2. Commercial library: Infragistics WinToolbars
  3. Blog about using the Microsoft Windows 7 SDK ribbon
  4. CodeProject article
  5. CodeProject post using the Windows 7 SDK