Shortly after the QT theme engine release, DotGNU announces the availability of the XP theme engine for its implementation of WinForms. The new XP engine allows DotGNU WinForms to use literally thousands of custom designed “visual styles”, such as those available from ThemeXP.org. Screenshots 1 and 2. On other .NET-related news,
Monodevelop 0.5 is released, #develop Fidalgo RC2 was released 3 days ago and wx.NET Beta 2 was released late last week.
XP theme engine for DotGNU WinForms; Other .NET-related News
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It looks like they combined XP and OS X. The overall theme looks partly like XP; with the minimize, max, shrink buttons form OS X, mixed with a little brushed metal.
Looks nice.
What you see on the screenshots are “visual styles”, i.e. themes that can be used with the theme engine. In other words, you can make DotGNU Portable.NET look like anything, using either the standard Luna style or custom styles from themexp.org – there’s more than 1300 different styles to choose from.
This is useless. Just add the Application.EnableVisualStyles(); method like .net 1.1 has, and link with version 6 of the controls dll instead of version 5 when it is called.
Uh, only this .net implementation and theme support works on unix and mac os x in addition to windows without comctrl32.dll…
On a related topic: I wish visual styles worked properly with the regular swf. Right now I have all sorts of problems with getting a constant look and feel on every version of windows. If the DotGNU WinForms guys manage to get it done right I would be willing to switch to their implementation instead of microsoft’s.
From msdn:
Q I wish FlatStyle.Standard would give me the themed look. That way, I could get the best of both worlds – themed look and feel as well as features like assigning a BackColor or image.
Agreed! We are planning to make our custom rendering code more theme-aware in a future version of the Framework.
Q Some Windows Forms controls don’t get themed properly – for example, the TabControl’s body has a grey background, which looks rather inconsistent and the NumericUpDown control’s up and down buttons aren’t themed.
Yes, this is again due to the fact that Windows Forms custom rendering, unfortunately, isn’t currently theme-aware. We will try and fix this in a future version!
The problem with waiting for fixes in this “future version” is we are supposed to be ditching swf and switching to avalon in a few years anyway. So what is the point of swf?
Oh and how you have to call EnableVisualStyles before run to get anything close to a consitant look and feel on xp sucks. In almost every .net app I use the programmer has forgotten to call it. This makes .net apps inconsistant with my desktop. Other toolkits like gtk or qt are much easier inregards to using the system style.
If you want every app themed, use WindowBlinds. Like always something released by MS smells half baked. uxtheme.dll is half baked. WindowBlinds skins more than uxtheme.dll, use less resources, and is hardware accelerated. Learn more from http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb4/. WindowBlinds skins app that are not theme aware, including window dialog messages, and the CMD.exe window.
That is fine for my desktop, but I want to be able to be able to distribute my .net app and have it work with the 100% proper style on my user’s desktops.