There should be an option to disable animations in the whole control

[floele-ww]

Animations in WPF unfortunately don't work well on many systems and introduce a notiable slowdown when using menu items, dropdown buttons or the backstage menu.
Currently, you have to manually edit all XAML files in Fluent and create a custom version of the control just to disable animations. Much better for maintainability would be a property in the Ribbon or RibbonWindow class to disable animations across the whole control.

[batzen]

Any suggestions on how to achieve this?

[floele]

I could imagine a property in the Ribbon class, maybe called "MenuAnimationStyle", which allows setting any value of an enum {Default,None,BackstageOnly). Then you could bind all PopupAnimation properties in the XAML file like this:

PopupAnimation="{Binding RelativeSource={RelativeSource FindAncestor, AncestorType={x:Type Fluent:Ribbon}}, Path=MenuAnimationStyle, Mode=OneWay, Converter={animationStyleConverter}, ConverterParameter=Fade}"

Where ConverterParameter specifies the animation to use if MenuAnimationStyle=Default, so that each theme can still have its own default animation.

For the backstage menu we could then adjust the ControlTemplate triggers to only set the margins or use a different animation without duration maybe.

I can also try and make these code changes if you agree with my suggestion.

[batzen]

Let me think about this for a few days.

[batzen]

Sorry for the delay. I don't have to work from 18.12.2015 till 18.01.2016, so I will implement this then.
I guess it would also make sense to disable animations automatically when a remote desktop session is established and animations are disabled in the remote desktop session settings.

[floele-ww]

Yes, that would make sense. Animations in RDP can be particularly annoying.
Thanks!

[batzen]

To solve this issue I was thinking about using MenuPopupAnimation and ComboBoxPopupAnimation from SystemParameters for "regular" controls.
For the backstage I could use ClientAreaAnimation from SystemParameters.

The only drawback for "regular" controls would be that the PopupAnimation would be the same for all themes across the ribbon.
I don't know what people would think about that drawback.

And I still have to test if it really works.
Edit: It does work as expected.

[floele-ww]

If overriding the animation like this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3160467/how-to-disable-wpf-contextmenu-animations works fine, I think the solution is reasonable.
I don't see any reason for themes having different menu animations in the first place, so I don't consider the "global" setting a problem. I guess some theme designers should comment on this ;)

[batzen]

As I am the designer I decide that no one needs different default animations. ;-)
Overwriting should work exactly as described in your linked stackoverflow post.

[floele-ww]

Great, thanks 👍

[floele-ww]

I noticed one issue that is still present in the current version. Not sure if you want to re-open or use this issue. The problem is that ComboBoxPopupAnimationKey=None does not work on sub menus. So if you open a drop down button menu, no animation is used, but if one of the items has a sub menu, it's animated again.

[batzen]

How about MenuPopupAnimationKey?

[floele-ww]

Yep, overriding both of these seems to work fine, thanks. I just wonder why I didn't set both of these options in the first place, seems kind of obvious actually.