Menu and/vs Toolbar in .Net CF Development

Developing pocketpc application using .Net CF in Visual Studio gives you lots of easiness to get the job done but also give some not-exactly-expected result sometime. You feel like it's just another app development since everything looks familiar with desktop app development only with some stuff not available, but besides that things are feels like home for desktop developer. At least until you start playing something like toolbar.

In the beginning of development, you have this style of menu :




It fits with the use of device with common left and right action button.

However, after a while you most probably think about adding a toolbar for common operation. It will be the time you find out that you no longer have access to device's left-right action button since it will then looks like below :



The toolbar need to "share" space with the menu, so the shortcut buttons no longer makes sense . It happens the same way when you have three menu like below :



But I think for the toolbar it's not really "fair", since many would expect something like below :



The above is actually achievable with a "hack" with panel and picturebox. It gets the job done, but I wonder why it's not how the standard toolbar class behave. It probably has something to do with screen space matters. However, a better option would be to let the developer choose by providing option on where the toolbar can be located and let those who want to keep left-right button functional but still want the toolbar can get what he want.

I guess, for now, .Net CF developer would need to hack away his toolbar implementation if he would like to keep the standard menu. Otherwise, if it's OK for him to have the toolbar sharing space with menu or even desire it to save space for something else, then the using standard toolbar class would be quite pleasurable.