Can I use the Windows Ribbon UI on Windows XP? how?

Question

I understand from reading Arik Poznanski's blog that the Windows Ribbon UI Framework is a COM object in Windows 7, and the WindowsRibbon wrapper is just a .NET veneer around that, to allow the Ribbon UI to be used in Windows Forms applications.

I've been successful in implementing a Hello World Windows Form app that employs this wrapper:

Windows Ribbon HEllo World

It is running on my development machine, which is Windows7.

Questions:

Will this "hello, world" application run on Vista? XP? Do I need to download something onto those machines in order to make that happen?
Is there a way to specify the Windows Ribbon UI components as a pre-requisite, in an MSI installer?

Thanks

Browsing around I found the documentation for UIRibbon.dll, which is the DLL on Windows7 that delivers the Ribbon UI. It lists these as minimum supported clients:

Windows 7, Windows Vista with SP2 and Platform Update for Windows Vista

how would I check for that in an MSI ?

For ribbon UI on XP, check out http://www.bcgsoft.com/ – saschabeaumont Apr 26 '11 at 22:47 — saschabeaumont, Apr 26 '11 at 22:47

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 25 '11 at 02:53

1

Best I can tell, you are taking on a dependency that won't work on Windows XP. This doesn't seem to be a redistributable component ( although I will admit hacking on a VM trying to see if I could transplant it into an XP machine ).

Since it isn't redistributable, I'm not sure there's any point in doing a search in MSI as you can just rely on checking the OS Major version ( Win7 ).

answered Apr 25 '11 at 02:53

Christopher Painter

54,556
6
63
100

Thanks for the reply. Ok, not available on WinXP. What about Vista? The doc page says it works on Vista with the "platform update." Any ideas on that? How would I check for that? Also - I'm curious. You did some hacking with XP. What happens when you run an app on XP, that depends on UIribbon.dll ? Did you try? – Cheeso Apr 25 '11 at 03:36
I only went as far as looking at it in depends and trying to see if I could get the CLSID's registered. If you look in the source code of that CodePlex project you'll find a class file that has the CLSID guid's. For an MSI, you write an AppSearch/RegLocator combination that searches the registry for that CLSID. – Christopher Painter Apr 25 '11 at 12:16
1

BTW, KB971644 is the platform update for Vista but it's only available through WSUS and Windows Update. However, it has a subcombone of KB960362 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960362/) which is available for download ( 4 versions for vista/2008/x86/x64 ) – Christopher Painter Apr 25 '11 at 12:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 18 '11 at 01:12

You are free to use a Ribbon UI wherever you like (subject to the Ribbon license agreement; which basically asks that you don't make a half-assed version).

There are companies that created their own Ribbon controls. Some of those implementations (i.e. Microsoft's Windows Ribbon Framework) only work on Windows 7 or Windows Vista (with a download installed first).

If you want to check that the Windows Ribbon Framework is available on the client machine, try to create a UIRibbonFramework object:

IUIFramework* pFramework = NULL;
HRESULT hr = ::CoCreateInstance(
            CLSID_UIRibbonFramework, 
            NULL,
            CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, 
            IID_PPV_ARGS(&pFramework));
if (FAILED(hr))
{
  //Ribbon not available - fallback to something else
  return;
}

Can I use the Windows Ribbon UI on Windows XP? how?

2 Answers2