Icons in an imagelist for a toolbar

[Mark Rae]

Hi,

I have a Windows app with a ToolBar control referencing an ImageList holding
a collection of icons from the \Common7\Graphics\icons folder.

Functionality-wise, all is well but, from an aesthetic viewpoint, they look
fairly amateurish. There is a distinct square of a slightly darker shade of
grey inside and, when disabled, they look really awful, almost like the
bitmaps have been replaced by dark grey squares.

Is this because I'm not doing something right, or are these icons not
particularly good? As far as I can tell, I'm using everything in a totally
standard way.

Ideally, I'd prefer the icons to resemble the Office XP ones, but would be
happy if they were the quality of those in WordPad from WinXP.

Any assistance gratefully received.

Best regards,

Mark Rae

 

[Dmitriy Lapshin [C# / .NET MVP]]

Hi,

The first thing you should try is setting the correct TransparentColor value
for the ImageList. Determine which RGB triplet corresponds to the dark grey
background and set this as the background color. Then remove all the icons
from the list and add them again. This should improve their appearance a
little bit.

 

[Mark Rae]

The first thing you should try is setting the correct TransparentColor value
for the ImageList. Determine which RGB triplet corresponds to the dark grey
background and set this as the background color. Then remove all the icons
from the list and add them again. This should improve their appearance a
little bit.

Excellent! That helped a great deal - didn't actually need to remove and
re-add the icons, in fact.

If anyone's interested, the transparent colour of the VS.NET 2003 bitmaps
(at least, the ones I'm using) is 192,192,192

 

[Dmitriy Lapshin [C# / .NET MVP]]

Mark,

didn't actually need to remove and
re-add the icons, in fact.

This not a requirement, but sometimes the ImageList won't apply the updated
TransparentColor until its content is re-populated.