VC++ Feature Pack that came with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 introduced support for the Office Fluent Ribbon. However, developers had to create ribbons entirely from code, because there was no support in the resource editor for that. Visual Studio 2010 comes with a visual designer for the ribbon.
You can choose whether to use a ribbon or a classical menu and toolbar when you create an application.
By default, the created ribbon has one category (Home) and two panels with several commands.
The ribbon can be opened from the resource editor. There is a new category called Ribbon. By default the ribbon resource is called IDR_RIBBON. The description of the ribbon is kept in an XML file called ribbon.mfcribbon-ms, located in the res folder.
When the ribbon is opened, the toolbar displays controls that can be dragged and drop into the ribbon, including categories, context categories, panels, and a series of controls such as buttons, checkbox, edits, progress bar, slider, etc.
There is support for several styles, Office like and Windows 7. These different styles can be seen in the following image.
The designer provides support for quick testing of the ribbon. On the Ribbon Editor toolbar there is a button called Test Ribbon that opens window with the ribbon. You can quickly see how it will look in the application, however, the commands are not available; clicking on the ribbon commands does not have any effect.
You can add handlers for the ribbon commands just like you do for a menu or a toolbar. In Visual Studio 2010 this can be done with the class wizard.
You can read more about the ribbon designed in MSDN or the VC++ Team’s Blog.
