CODEWITHSUNDEEP
csswinformsvisual-studio-2013stylesheet
Comfort Eagle
Comfort Eagle

Reputation: 2452

Applying stylesheets to VB.net form controls

I'm using a Windows Form Application in Visual Studio 2013 to design a prototype for a software. I'm not a software-developer, the only purpose of the project is to communicate with the dev-team to let them know what the end-product is supposed to look like.

There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing control, like buttons, textboxes, etc. so I was wondering if it is possible to attach stylesheets to VB.NET projects? Thank you

Upvotes: 2

Views: 6872

Answers (2)

Fede
Fede

Reputation: 44038

There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing control, like buttons, textboxes, etc.

NO. winforms is a really old technology that basically has no amount of built-in support for custom UIs. It is not recommended for any new projects (only to maintain legacy applications) and it will be completely useless if you're not a developer, since any sort of custom look and feel needs to be done with an ugly procedural code technique called "owner draw", which requires too much code for anything, and is unable to provide professional-looking UIs due to the lack of hardware acceleration and lack of support for pixel-independent UIs.

If you're doing a prototype (as opposed to a real application), as others have recommended, you should use design tools such as Photoshop, or maybe a quick HTML + CSS kind of approach.

Otherwise, you can easily create a modern-looking application using a technology that is the replacement of winforms, called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, for short.

There's also a design tool made specifically for this technology, called Expression Blend, which is bundled with recent versions of Visual Studio, and offers a very designer-centric approach to building UIs:

enter image description here

To summarize: winforms is useless. Use proper, relevant, current technology instead.

Upvotes: 4

Scott Wylie
Scott Wylie

Reputation: 4735

There are no such things as stylesheets in WinForms applications. You can change the appareance on a form and control basis by changing the Appearance properties.

You can create base controls and forms that have your appearance changes and then use those to create other forms to make things easier to design out the screen.

There are also 3rd party control sets that do have skins/themes, which maybe what you want but you have to purchase them first then you are limited to that control suite.

Upvotes: 0

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