How to Screate Skin For Vb Form

[hasmukh hapra]

Hello Everyone,

I have a requirement of writing a WinForm application that should
support
"SKINS" for the UI. On applying a skin, the look and feel of the
application
can change drastically. Even the size and shape of the Main window and
its
child controls can change.

I have NO idea about, how to achieve this in .NET WinForms.

Any Article, Link, Sample or Lecture will be greatly appriciated with
Tons
of Thanks

Thanks

* (Hasmukh);

===================================
Hasmukh Hapra,
Ahmedabad. India.

 

[Chris Dunaway]

Programmatically, you can try a couple of things:

First, you can use the TransparencyKey property of the form to set a
color to be transparent then set the background of the form to an
image. Any place in the image that has the transparent color, the form
will be transparent in those areas.

Another method is to create a Region and assign it to the form's Region
property. This will physically change the actual shape of the form.
The basic steps are 1. Create a GraphicsPath object and use its
various methods to create your shape. 2. Create a Region object by
passing the GraphicsPath into the constructor. Finally 3. assign the
form's Region property to the region object you created. You will have
to paint the form how you wish it to appear or place a bitmap the same
shape as the region on the background.

Finally, if you up to a commercial solution, go a Google search for
IrisSkin. It is a very easy skinning control. It literally takes 3
lines of code to skin your app. I looked at it a little bit and was
fairly impressed. As I recall, it was reasonably affordable as well.

Here is the link:

http://www.sunisoft.com/irisskin/index.htm

Hope this helps