Telerik RadCommandBar gets Load and Save Layout functionality

Those people over at Telerik have recently released the new Q3 Version for WinForms. In it there's some quite funky stuff as well as a whole new control called the RadCommandBar.

The RadCommandBar is the toolbar replacement for the RadToolStrip and has some additional features. But the one I'm looking at here is the ability to Load and Save the layout.

As the RadCommandBar allows a user to add and remove the items on the RadCommandBar (just like a Microsoft Office toolbar for example) and grab the ToolStrip rows and re-arrange them, you may want to save these preferences so that the next time the user launches your form, all the layout preferences of the RadCommandBar are as they left them.

Even though the RadCommandBar is new to the Telerik suite of WinForms controls, the documentation is pretty good, though this little documented feature is a real gem and very easy to use.

So, let's say you want to load the layout of a RadCommandBar on launching your form, simply write in the Form Load event

If My.Computer.FileSystem.FileExists("C:\MyCommandBar.xml") Then

          Me.RadCommandBar1.CommandBarElement.LoadLayout("C:\MyCommandBar.xml")

End If

Then when you close the form for exmaple:

Me.RadCommandBar1.CommandBarElement.SaveLayout("C:\MyCommandBar.xml")

It couldn't be much easier. Take a look at the overall feature of the RadCommandBar here.

What am I doing?

What am I doing? I don't know what made me start a blog now, or as yet what I'm going to blog about but for some reason I had the urge to start one.

Just recently, I've been spending many of my evenings sitting at my new laptop. My partner, upstairs preparing work, I thought that doing something constructive would be better than watching yet another episode of Top Gear on Dave (sorry Jeremy. I love you and your Hamster and Slow, but there are only so many re-runs I can take).

So, being a programmer, and a big fan of the Telerik components that we use in our daily development, I thought I'd start trying to help out in the Telerik Forums and submitting Code Library articles. There was no aim at first other than filling a couple of hours, but I quickly became quite taken with it.

Maybe you think this is a little sad, but I can tell you, it has huge benefits for more than just the people that I'm trying to answer questions for.

First off, yes, there's the satisfaction of having a response marked as answer by another fellow developer who needed help. My own knowledge of the products has rocketed, and this helps in my daily life at work. I also end up earning Telerik points for my company which means that we are now on track to get huge discounts on new products. It keeps me thinking of programming too. Some may say this is bad, but I really love it.

So, I want to thank Telerik for giving me some extra motivation. And, if you're a .NET prgrammer too, I'd suggest having a look at the Telerik controls.