Prevent showing border of a disabled menu item on mouse hover

Question

When I hover over a ToolStripMenuItem , it shows a border around it even when it is disabled. Is there any property to remove this?

I've looked for properties like Hover or Border but haven't found anything of use.

Answer 1

ToolStripProfessionalRenderer draws the border by default using MenuItemBorder property of ProfessionalColorTable .

To make the border just visible for enabled menu items, you can create your custom ProfessionalColorTable and your custom ToolStripProfessionalRenderer and add a new MenuItemEnabledBorder returning the default border color, and also overriding MenuItemBorder to return Color.Transparent .

Then in your custom renderer, it's enough to override OnRenderMenuItemBackground and draw the border using MenuItemEnabledBorder when the item is highlighetd.

Code

public class MyColorTable : ProfessionalColorTable
{
    public override Color MenuItemBorder { get { return Color.Transparent; } }
    public Color MenuItemEnabledBorder { get { return base.MenuItemBorder; } }
}

public class MyRenderer : ToolStripProfessionalRenderer
{
    public MyRenderer() : base(new MyColorTable()) { }
    protected override void OnRenderMenuItemBackground(ToolStripItemRenderEventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnRenderMenuItemBackground(e);
        if (e.Item.Enabled && e.Item.Selected)
        {
            using (var pen = new Pen(((MyColorTable)ColorTable).MenuItemEnabledBorder))
            {
                var r = new Rectangle(2, 0, e.Item.Width - 4, e.Item.Height - 1);
                e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(pen, r);
            }
        }
    }
}

Then to use the renderer, it's enough to set it as renderer of your tool strip:

this.toolStrip1.Renderer = new MyRenderer();

Answer 2

You can override ToolStripProfessionalRenderer class and pass your colors (if you dont want border pass the original BackColor) to its base class constructor:

namespace WindowsFormsApplication11
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            menuStrip1.Renderer = new CustomColors();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

        }
    }

    private class CustomColors : ToolStripProfessionalRenderer
    {
        public CustomColors() : base(new MyColors()) { }
    }

    private class MyColors : ProfessionalColorTable
    {
        public override Color MenuItemSelected
        {
            get { return Color.GreenYellow; }
        }
        public override Color MenuItemSelectedGradientBegin
        {
            get { return Color.DarkBlue; }
        }
        public override Color MenuItemSelectedGradientEnd
        {
            get { return Color.Yellow; }
        }
    }
}