Desmond File

Blog archive

Microsoft Gets Fluent

The context-sensitive UI of Microsoft Office 2007 got a name the other day, and developers got a deal in the process. The newly minted Fluent UI boasts all the bells and whistles that garnered Office 2007 so much attention last fall, including the innovative ribbon interface and context-aware controls.

More important, Microsoft is making the Fluent UI available for developers to use in their applications, royalty free. The licensing program will let developers build applications that boast the look and feel of Office 2007 applications, including the context-aware ribbon controls. A Design Guidelines document provides what Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft general manager of the Office Client, describes as "a roadmap for developers implementing the UI."

Among those likely to adopt the program are component and software tool vendors, commercial application ISVs and developers of complex enterprise-level systems.

"The license is available for applications on any platform, except for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications that currently have the new UI (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access)," states Numoto in a press release. "We wanted to make the IP available broadly to partners because it has benefits to Microsoft and the Office Ecosystem. At the same time, we wanted to preserve the uniqueness of the Office UI for the core Office productivity components.

Do you plan to work the Fluent UI into your applications? Let me know what you think of this news at [email protected], and we may publish your responses!

Posted by Michael Desmond on 01/24/2007


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

  • Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

    We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?

  • TypeScript 5.8 Beta Speeds Program Loads, Updates

    "TypeScript 5.8 introduces a number of optimizations that can both improve the time to build up a program, and also to update a program based on a file change in either --watch mode or editor scenarios."

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube