Making it beautiful

[Invisionsoft]

The .NET application 'Paint.NET' has just received a face lift, specifically:

See the blog post: Paint.NET » Blog Archive » Paint.NET v3.5 prepares for beta and gets a visual refresh

I would really like to know how he got the menu bar to look so beautiful. Note he has done the same for toolstrips too. I hate the 98 style controls .NET makes us use, and even with diving into the Vista API I have not managed to get that kind of style.

Does anyone have *any* ideas as to how he is quite doing that? He is quite an efficient programmer by my recollections as a regular reader of the blog, and I doubt he is doing anything to make JohnH cringe, but I know for sure it's not default behaviour.

I have changed the icons in my app to Vista style ones, and it looks beautiful, but upgrading the actual menustrip would make the app a dream.

Suggestions?


- James

 

[JohnH]

That's not far from how menustrips paints in Vista by default. In VS the only difference is the gradient vertical fill from white to light blue for selected items and the black-only text. This can be done by assigning a ToolStripRenderer to the Renderer property of the MenuStrip. ToolStripRenderer Class (System.Windows.Forms)
In the above image there is also some transparency, where you can set the alpha byte in Color.FromArgb.

 

[Invisionsoft]

Before you posted I got a private message, as follows:

Since this is from another forum, I wanted to give ya a couple of links for customizing the toolstrip:
Custom VisualStudio2008 style MenuStrip and ToolStrip Renderer - VBForums
[WIP] Custom Vista-style (blue/green) ToolStripRenderer - VBForums
Customizable ToolStrip control - including all Office2003 styles! - VBForums

This guy's made a number of really neat controls.

From JuggaloBrotha

You were both on the same track, and I have used the first link from there and it looks beautiful. Screenshot included.




Regards,
- James