c# - changing the appearance of my windows form

Question

I am developing a windows form. I want to change the physical appearance of the form and its controls. I was able to use the Skincrafter demo, however this is making the application substantially heavier. I am not satisfied with how "heavy" it feels when navigating through tabs, moving the window, etc. It's fairly simple program and I do not have this issue when not using skincrafter. When not using it, the GUI is very responsive and I want to keep it that way.

I've tried many different skins and the results are very similar in every case.

So I will not be using skincrafter unless someone points me out to possible reasons for this slower GUI. I followed their tutorial and didn't do anything else. Simple process. Before: fast GUI - after: slow GUI.

Can anyone recommend me another way to change the appearance of my controls/form? Is there way to programatically change the appearance of controls and form, without relying on a third party skinning software?

Note that I do not want my users to change skins. I want to apply one and that's it.

thank you Steve

Edit: The project is far from done so I am going to give WPF some real good thoughts so I don't end up doing this when I have a 4x times as large as it is right now. I've already start converting and it shouldn't be much of problem. Found timer and serialport cannot be front from the toolbox and timer are replaced by dispatchtimer. No big deal so far. One another thing that makes me want to work with WPF is that I may have the need to make graphs (plotting) to show temperature over time. I use serialport to communicate with an external USB controller (virtual COM port) that reads a bunch of temperature sensors and fan speeds. I suspect graphing to be better with WPF. One last thing: it's just about colors/fonts but more about looks of the buttons, looks of the actual window (border shapes). What I wanted to do was something similar that is done with html and css. I do want to have custom labels to give them the look of a "digital display" for real time temperatures and fan speed measurements.

again thanks all for the help provided!

Answer 1

In the distant past, I added lightweight skinning to WinForms projects by subclassing the out-of-the-box controls (Label, TextBox, etc), and having that subclass read in appearance configuration (eg color, font) from an XML file (one could also use app.config).

That approach was easy to implement, and I saw no visible performance degradation.

If you just want a consistent, new look and don't need to enable the end user to pick from a variety of skins, the subclassing approach is very straightforward. For example, to modify the look of a Label :

public MyLabel : Label
{
    MyLabel()
    {
        this.ForeColor = Colors.Blue;
    }
}

Then, everywhere you currently have a Label in your code, use a MyLabel instead.

If you are starting a new project, I would highly recommend using WPF instead. It provides a much more flexible UI framework. One key feature is that it separates the look from the UI implementation.