Did we lose the RadioCheck property on menuitems

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A

academic

ToolStripMenuItems do not have a RadioCheck property.

Is this feature not available with the new StripMenu or is it just that I
haven't found out how?

Hard to believe they dropped such a nice feature.

Is it still available some how?


thanks

When searching the help doc in VS2005 it appears that it can only do the
simplest search. That is, no RegExpressions or more then one word or
searching previous results. Is that the way it is or am I missing something?
 
ToolStripMenuItems do not have a RadioCheck property.

Is this feature not available with the new StripMenu or is it just that I
haven't found out how?

Hard to believe they dropped such a nice feature.

Is it still available some how?
Click to expand...

VB 2005 has a Checked = True/False property.
 
But I want the little ball to indicate it's a radio button.
From what I read I'll have to draw it myself.

thanks
 
But I want the little ball to indicate it's a radio button.
From what I read I'll have to draw it myself.
Click to expand...

Don't remember that being there. IIRC, you fake it with software so as you
check one item it unchecks the others.
 
Homer, User Interface Conventions call for mutually exclusive checkmarks on
a menu to be rendered as a Radio "dot" or "ball." WindowsForms normal menus
had the RadioCheck option which caused checkmarks to be rendered as a
dot.... though they (WindowsForms' normal menus) didn't actually "enforce"
the mutual exclusivity of the checks like a real set of radio buttons, they
did support the glyph (via the RadioCheck property).

With the "new" ToolStripMenuItems I guess you're supposed to convey this
mutual exclusivity using images. If you look at the View menu in Microsoft
Word you'd see what I mean (Normal, Page Layout, etc etc are mutually
exclusive). Still, the ToolstripMenuItem supports a regular built-in
checkmark so it's retarded that it doesn't support a RadioCheck property as
well. It's just one example of something I call "the little things" that
matter.

There's no Unit Test for follow-through failures like this. It's just one
example of the general decline of quality of certain aspects of MS software.
Every day I run into something in Visual Studio 2005 or Office 2003 that
makes me want to tear my hair out..... it wasn't so with VS2003 or Office
2002.
 
Homer, User Interface Conventions call for mutually exclusive checkmarks
on a menu to be rendered as a Radio "dot" or "ball." WindowsForms normal
menus had the RadioCheck option which caused checkmarks to be rendered as
a dot.... though they (WindowsForms' normal menus) didn't actually
"enforce" the mutual exclusivity of the checks like a real set of radio
buttons, they did support the glyph (via the RadioCheck property).

With the "new" ToolStripMenuItems I guess you're supposed to convey this
mutual exclusivity using images. If you look at the View menu in Microsoft
Word you'd see what I mean (Normal, Page Layout, etc etc are mutually
exclusive). Still, the ToolstripMenuItem supports a regular built-in
checkmark so it's retarded that it doesn't support a RadioCheck property
as well. It's just one example of something I call "the little things"
that matter.

There's no Unit Test for follow-through failures like this. It's just one
example of the general decline of quality of certain aspects of MS
software. Every day I run into something in Visual Studio 2005 or Office
2003 that makes me want to tear my hair out..... it wasn't so with VS2003
or Office 2002.
Click to expand...

What are you going to do? I've given up caring - I just try to keep up as
best I can. Who thought that learning Algol 68 and Cobol on main frames with
punch cards would wind up like this? Oh well.

I used to think that Microsoft had the best QA, possibly computer savvy nuns
with brass edged rulers and a bad attitude. But it seems to have slipped. It
does seem to me that they have finally made the documentation similar to
Unix man pages - OCIAK.
 
Whew! I thought I was the only one irked by the removal of native support
for radio button-style menu items in VS05. I think I did the same thing you
did when I first discovered the feature loss, looked around at other MS
applications to see how they represented a mutually exclusive list of
selectable menu items. Your example (MS Word's use of menu item images) is
an OK way to go I guess, but in most cases I don't have a team of artists I
can call on to create custom images for each one of my mutually exclusive
options. Microsoft should allow me to create a "quick-and-dirty"
implementation of radio button-style menu items without having to resort to
using menu images or customizing a control.

What really gets me about this is that the principle of a mutually exclusive
set of options is at the heart of the Windows GUI. If for some reason you
had to explain the Windows GUI standard in a paragraph or less, there'd
surely be something in there about radio buttons. Along with stuff like
text boxes, check boxes, list boxes, and combo boxes, radio buttons are one
of the most fundamental building blocks of any GUI interface. I just don't
understand how this could have been omitted from the new menu controls.
Bring back the dot!

OK. I feel much better now. :-)

- Mitchell S. Honnert
 
Microsoft's recent crop of developer hires seem to come from another world
camp... possibly Unix C++ folks or something. And, MS has no master "Steve
Jobs" type person overseeing the quality and consistency and aesthetics.....
it's all *Marketing* that is "overseeing" stuff at at Microsoft and Radio
Checks and Consistent User Interfaces is at the BOTTOM of their list.

If you take a look at how Office implements SDI... even in Office 2003...
you'd see what I mean. I mean it's one thing that Word implements true SDI
and Excel and PowerPoint implement Fake-SDI (via "Windows In Taskbar"
feature).... I'm OK with that. BUT even between them Excel and PowerPoint
implement it DIFFERENTLY. If you click on the pop X close button in
PowerPoint (when Windows in Taskbar setting is ON) only the current window
closes (I like that... it's very SDI-like). If you do the same in Excel ALL
your open documents on your taskbar close. This is RETARDED.

Also, Outlook 2003 puts an icon in the tray (you have no choice) and you
have the option to "Minimize to Tray." Which is great...... but if you close
the main Outlook window you close the icon too. NO OTHER application in the
world that makes use of the tray behaves like this. Instead the option
should not be "Minimize to Tray" it should be "Allow Outlook to run in the
background" and you can close the main window and still keep the tray icon
along with e-mail notifications, task notifications, and calendar
appointment notifications, bla bla bla.

I saw in the latest Visa UI Guidelines that they were actually incorporating
the Outlook way of doing the tray thing into the Guidelines. That is
RETARDED. No other app behaves that way. I want MINIMIZE TO MEAN MINIMIZE.
Those guys at MS are on Crack nowadays.

OK. Now I feel much better too. :-)
 
I had a warm fuzzy feeling for MS after seeing their great work in putting
out .NET 1.0 and 1.1. But Visual Studio 2005, Office 2003, and lack-of-focus
server hodgepodge offerings have really ticked me off in the last 1.5 years.
I don't think I can take another Acronym... I'll suffocate.

I personally think MS has gotten too big. They need to take a step back and
reevaluate the quality of their stuff.... not just its feature-set. And the
Marketing Dept needs to be reigned in... Marketing should be at the disposal
of the other teams... not the other way around.
 
What I take away from your post is a sense of how different the GUI's are in
MS Office apps. Which I also find quite troubling because I always assumed
a uniformity of interface design was one of the major selling points of
Office. If your corporate users already knew MS Word, they didn't
necessarily have to be retrained to learn MS Excel or MS PowerPoint.
Because the products followed the common GUI standards, if they knew one,
they could catch on to the other. Perhaps I'm not a good judge because I'm
on the end of the spectrum that prefers a clean, simple, "eyecandy free"
interface, but I think most people would agree that keeping a uniform set of
interface rules is a good idea for all Windows applications, and especially
for MS's flagship application suite.

- Mitchell S. Honnert
 
No piece of software is perfect... and one will always find something to
gripe about. But, Microsoft has been at this for 15 years and their
contribution to many aspects of computing productivity has been in the
*negative* department in *recent* years. I think Windows' "golden years"
peak was in the 1999 - 2001 range. While, WinXP was a much improved version
of Windows 2000 (in terms of stability and hardware compatibility) the look
and feel, GUI consistency, application behavior, of Windows 2000 and Office
2000 and all other 3rd party applications was just a pure joy to work with.

Then WinXP comes out... and I actually like the gee-whiz UI. BUT, how come
Office XP didn't have it? That was just stupid and glaring. Nor did Visual
Studio 2002 or 2003- the premier development platform for WinXP. Come on.

All you have to do is look at FireFox (which I'm actually not a big fan of,
mind you) and then look at IE to see just how much Microsoft has STAGNATED
in many areas of innovation (.NET notwithstanding). I still find it
laughable that the "docked-on-the-right-side" feature of Outlook 2003 was
actually marketed as a feature. I mean, come on.
 
CMM said:
Homer, User Interface Conventions call for mutually exclusive checkmarks
on a menu to be rendered as a Radio "dot" or "ball." WindowsForms normal
menus had the RadioCheck option which caused checkmarks to be rendered as
a dot.... though they (WindowsForms' normal menus) didn't actually
"enforce" the mutual exclusivity of the checks like a real set of radio
buttons, they did support the glyph (via the RadioCheck property).

With the "new" ToolStripMenuItems I guess you're supposed to convey this
mutual exclusivity using images. If you look at the View menu in Microsoft
Word you'd see what I mean (Normal, Page Layout, etc etc are mutually
exclusive). Still, the ToolstripMenuItem supports a regular built-in
checkmark so it's retarded that it doesn't support a RadioCheck property
as well. It's just one example of something I call "the little things"
that matter.
Click to expand...

To me it seems that Office's command bars do not support mutually exclusive
options via radio check menu items. I too believe that this is a design
flaw because checkmarks and radiobuttons serve different purposes. Word
2003's 'Windows' menu uses checkmarks to indicate the currently active
document.

I still do not see any signs from Microsoft understanding the high-level
goals of the Classic VB petition: Do not make changes only for the reason
of making a change. People do not want revolutionary changes, they want a
natural evolution. Revolutionary changes are an indicator of very early
design stages, but Microsoft has 20+ years of experience with user
interfaces.
 
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