Intelligent Infrastructure and Extensibility
Groups, Items and Links
DevExpress is committed to improving productivity and maximize your ability to deliver compelling solutions to your end-users. For this reason, the XtraNavBar provides a flexible group and item linking mechanism. If you need to have a link with the same functionality in multiple groups, you don't have to create new items with the same settings for every group you require. Because groups don't hold items, only links to items, you can create a single item, specify its content and event handlers and link it to as many groups as necessary. If you don't need multiple links to the same item, you don't need to worry about links whatsoever. When customizing a control at design-time via built-in menus, you do it as if there are no links - only groups and items. The same at runtime - you can add a new item to a group with a single line of code! 
View and Layout Customization Completely Independent from Content
With the XtraNavBar, you can rest assured that you will be able to provide a superior end user experience. The reason for this is that the control's content and its representation are fully separated. You only need to customize items and link them to groups. After that has been done, you can allow your end users to choose any link layout they want and even any available paint style - without having to restructure anything! And when we provide a new paint style, you don't need to redo a thing - just change the control's ViewName property to provide your end users with the same data in a new layout.
View Extensibility and Registration
If you need to add custom functionality to views and reuse such views in multiple applications, you can create your own custom view and register it so that it is available even at design-time. Creating a custom view implies creating a view descendant which:
- Provides the view's name;
- Provides objects implementing particular parts of the view's functionality. For instance, objects that will paint links and group headers, etc.;
- Provides data that will be used by the view. For instance, the default style settings for views.
As you may notice, the approach described is really flexible since you can combine existing objects implementing different pieces of functionality for different views.
The control's installation includes the custom view demo that shows you how to override default style settings for a view. 
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