Making Form Desinger stuff "look XP"

[philprice]

Hi all,

The topic describes it all - how, and if not why not

Peace.

 

[Divil]

You can enable XP theming on your applications by giving them a manifest file. There is information in MSDN on how to do this.

 

[quwiltw]

If youre talking about making them look XP at design time, we did this by adding the manifest in the VS directory, and it worked, but we removed it shortly thereafter for some reason that escapes right now. It was a bad idea as I recall -- somehow made things break.

 

[philprice]

okay if i manifest my own app to look xp by using common controls 6.0 will people using 5.0 etc will get the standard look?

 

[Divil]

Yes, the purpose of the manifest file is to tell windows to use Common Controls 6 if its available, regardless of what version then application was compiled with.

And regarding quwiltws comments, adding a manifest file to the IDE is a very bad idea. It actually changes the way the IDE serializes resources, so youll never know theres a problem when you open your solution on your computer, but as soon as you give it to someone without that manifest, they wont be able to read the serialized resources properly.

 

[Winston]

some controls in .net id say isnt really well designed for the XP OS
i mean the notify tray doesnt support balloons

the toolbars dont support the gradient background
and the tab controls differ from the ones programed inside windows xp windows

 

[philprice]

note: tabs look okay here (identical to XP ones)..