Ribbon Skinning

[3am]

Anybody know how to skin the ribbon in like Paint and Wordpad?

I can make a flat one in msstyles but it's only good in black & white. Otherwise:

1) Played with the bitmaps in UIRibbonRes.dll and got nothing
2) Opened the UIFILES res files and got nothing
3) Tried to hex edit some of it and got nothing
4) Disassembled it and got nothing

So if anybody is able to actually skin the ribbon please let me know how so I can do it too

[ka-la]

hardcoded... in office there is 3 options you can choose from... , ive used the ribbon wpf toolkit for visual studio and you can change the color of the ribbon from there but not after its compiled... i guess you are out of luck this time, but some sort of HEX might come thru.

[3am]

Thanks. Also want to thank Panda X and davesenior for their help.

1) The background is hardcoded. In this case the ribbon is called "Scenic".
2) There is a property in msstyles such that if you change it's value it forces the ribbon into flat classic mode. Panda can't remember which property it is. I changed it unknowingly in my msstyles so I can have a flat black background. I've made so many changes it'd take me forever to find the right one so I'm not going to look for it.
3) The bitmaps in UIRibbonRes.dll are useable only when the ribbon is in classic mode.
4) So no transparency and likely no gradients are possible. Just a solid color and only if you've made the unknown property value change to force a classic ribbon look.

[Dave Senior]

If you have :
    Fonts & System Metrics >BTNFACE:COLOR Black (rgb  0, 0, 0 )
                  "                      BTNTEXT:COLOR White (rgb 255, 255, 255 )
                                        /****   Has to be these colors  ****/
  ......it forces classic/high contrast  colors to show in the ribbon , so you'll be ok with your .msstyle, the rest of us are  .....d

[3am]

If you have :
    Fonts & System Metrics >BTNFACE:COLOR Black (rgb  0, 0, 0 )
                  "                      BTNTEXT:COLOR White (rgb 255, 255, 255 )
                                        /****   Has to be these colors  ****/
  ......it forces classic/high contrast  colors to show in the ribbon , so you'll be ok with your .msstyle, the rest of us are  .....d

Yeah that's it. Thanks. You make these black and white, ribbon goes classic, and then you can recolor the background of the ribbon anything solid using the bitmaps in UIRibbonRes.

Good to get that sorted out finally

Also works if BTNFACE:COLOR is white and BTNTEXT:COLOR is black.

I wonder why?

[ezio84]

If you have :
    Fonts & System Metrics >BTNFACE:COLOR Black (rgb  0, 0, 0 )
                  "                      BTNTEXT:COLOR White (rgb 255, 255, 255 )
                                        /****   Has to be these colors  ****/
  ......it forces classic/high contrast  colors to show in the ribbon , so you'll be ok with your .msstyle, the rest of us are  .....d

Thank you so much for this workaround!