Metro Style User Interface Controls

Metro is user interface design-language that is heavily type based, think text, and which uses design principles of classic Swiss graphic design. Metro design excludes superfluous graphic and window chrome and it puts actual content up front. It uses large titles and pages with lateral scrolling. Result is clean, sleek user interface that gets out of the way.

Starting with DotNetBar 10.0 we are including world's first set of WinForms Metro user interface controls that you can use to build Metro applications. Here is screen-shot of MetroBill, a sample application that illustrates Metro design and which is included with DotNetBar:

Our Metro controls allow you to have unlimited color themes for your apps. We designed proprietary color scheme generation algorithms that use as input two colors you specify and then generate complete color scheme for all our controls. Our color theme is composed of more than 5000 color parts.

Following controls are included:

Metro Application Form

MetroAppForm is a chrome less application form. It does not have any window chrome and is provided as clean slate for hosting MetroShell control.

Application form however has support for the modal panels. Modal panels is the concept we introduced specifically for the Metro applications. It allows you to slide into the view the panel which requires user input without using modal dialog. This fits much better into Metro design language and provides smoother user experience.

MetroShell

MetroShell control is top-level Metro control which provides key application user interface elements:

• Application Menu, either Backstage or standard menu
• Quick Access Toolbar with customization
• Minimum window chrome with system buttons and title text
• Settings and Help buttons as part of form title
• Main application tabs

Metro Tile Panel

MetroTilePanel control is an multi-touch tile panel control. It is used to present metro tiles grouped and un-grouped. Grouping allows categorization of tiles by function. For example in image above you can see the Start group and part of Tools group. MetroTilePanel allows re-arranging of tiles using either touch or mouse. You simply drag & drop the tile into desired position and panel will animate the transition. Metro tiles can also be checked as shown in image above using the right-click or secondary tap touch action.

Page Slider

PageSlider control is an multi-touch page slider control which can be used to present any content on pages. Pages can be changed using the optional scroll-bar or by dragging the page with mouse into the view. However, preferred method of operation is using touch gestures to flick pages in and out of the view. Page slider also support inertial scrolling so if you quickly flick with the finger on the screen it will continue page scrolling and slow down gradually.

Metro Toolbar

MetroToolbar control is a toolbar with two button areas. It shows most commonly used commands at all times but also allows user to access infrequently used or extra commands by expanding the toolbar to reveal extra content. MetroToolbar control automatically participates in customization by allowing end-user to right-click the buttons and add them to Quick Access Toolbar.

Metro Status Bar

MetroStatusBar control is a Metro styled status bar which can be used to provide application current status and provide optional grippers to resize the form in bottom right corner.

Slide Panel

SlidePanel is panel control which can slide in and out of the view from any of 4 sides. When out of the view panel can display optional "thumb" that can be dragged or clicked to bring control back into the view. Lateral sliding of the content is one of the key design concept of Metro UI.

Metro Form

MetroForm is dialog form in Metro style. It is provided to be used as replacement for standard Form when dialogs need to be added to Metro apps.

Download fully functional trial of DotNetBar for Windows Forms now and experience how easy it is to create professional looking applications.