The Infragistics UltraToolbar: Didn’t those used to be underlined?

A week or so after writing the previous post about our almost bug-free upgrade of Infragistics NetAdvantage, I belatedly noticed another bug worth mentioning.

In NetAdvantage, there aren’t separate "menu bar" and "toolbar" controls — everything is a toolbar.  A menu bar is just a toolbar with lots of text and not many icons.  Fair enough.  But not all NetAdvantage toolbars are equal – you can set the IsMainMenuBar property on one (and only one) toolbar.  In the version of NetAdvantage that we were previously using, 2007 Volume 1, this property seemed to have only one effect: it forced that toolbar to be on a separate row from all of the others.  This seemed like an odd feature, so we never used it.

At some point between 2007 Volume 1 and 2008 Volume 2, the IsMainMenuBar property became a lot more important: if none of your toolbars have it, then you lose your accelerator keys.  (By "accelerator keys", I mean the underlined letters in menus that can be used with the Alt key as a shortcut.  Some of the young folk today call them "access keys", go figure.)

I didn’t notice until one of our internal testers diplomatically asked "um, didn’t those used to be underlined"?  It took me awhile to figure out that the IsMainMenuBar property was at the root of the problem – this behaviour isn’t documented and, oddly, I couldn’t find any reference to the problem on the Infragistics forums.   I submitted the problem to Infragistics, and so far they are handling it as a bug, not a feature. 

The workaround is easy enough: use the IsMainMenuBar property.  Since this forces other toolbars onto separate rows of the screen, we also merged everything into one toolbar: I figure the loss of screen real estate would be more annoying to users than losing the ability to position the toolbars on the screen.