Free skinner

[IcingDeath]

As far as I can remember I was never completely satisfied with the way my apps looked and if I was, I got bored of the way the looked after using them for so much in their debug stage. So yesterday I tried to find some sort of free skin component. That turned up nothing. I found some controls in the range of 50$ and I was tempted to buying them but when I tested them they kind of sucked. The only good controls I found costed around 300$ which is pretty high for my budget. So I sat down and tried to think of an easy way to make my own skin component. Here is what I got so far from the design point of view:

1) application that creates skins

1. Opens assemblies with reflection and lists all forms in them
2. After the user selects a form, it passes it to the 'designer' form
3. The 'designer' has a property grid, a picturebox and a textbox
4. A preview of the form for which the skin is being built is shown on the picture box and the user can click on the various controls that form has and edit their properties through the property grid.
5. I am also thinking of enabling the user to write event handlers (like for the Paint event) to provide more flexibility - that it is what the textbox is for
6. The designer will save all this information in an xml file (thats a piece of cake)

2) DLL that applications will use

1. During startup of a form the some method from a class in the dll would be called to apply all the property changes that the skin designer set, plus hook all events to the eventhandlers he wrote and thats it....

I will also post a screenshot of what I did so far and I would like some input

If I manage to complete this project, I will post it here along with the source code.

 

[IcingDeath]

I just figured that this thing can also be used for localization

 

[tyonuts]

If u still want to skin your app, maybe u should try downloading Windows Media SDK from Microsoft's website. It only helps u skin Windows Media Player, but u should get the idea of how things are done.
As for the code, try MSDN. U wouldn't guess what kind of stupid-named articles with good stuff there are in there.

By the way, do u want just to change colors and stuff, or to REALLY skin your app (like WinAmp)?