How to use the ribbon in my .NET applications?

This is what WordPad looks like in Windows 7:

The ribbon is also in paint. Which leads me to think that the ribbon is "hidden" somewhere in a dll file that I could import into my C# apps. Is this true? If not how did Microsoft make the ribbon.

Yes I'm aware that there are already companies who have made the ribbon for C# but I want to just use P/Invoke to add it to my apps.

Solution

As Matthew Flaschen mentions, you can download a CTP of the WPF Ribbon Control from CodePlex. However, it is important to point out that this is currently very incomplete. I tried it out recently and found it to be decent, but rather buggy.

You won't be able to properly use the WPF Ribbon control (to its full extent at least) until .NET 4.0 is released. I'm not sure whether it's included in the current Beta 1, but it should (almost) definitely be part of the core WPF library in the final release. This ought to be much more stable and complete in terms of features. Whether the feature set will match that of the Microsoft Office Ribbon is another question - doubtful, in my mind, though you might expect WPF by nature to provide some sort of extensibility.

Update: Indeed, the Beta 1 release of the .NET Framework 4.0 details (in the overview section) that a WPF Ribbon control is included. Worth checking it out, as I would strongly suspect it is significantly more advanced than the one on CodePlex.