Skins, Themes and Visual Styles

Lately I have been working on integrating an advanced skinning engine into the PPJ Framework for our next mahor release. There are many different solutions out there, but I was looking for the best possible one and had to do some research and to define some criteria for the screening.

Here are some of the most important features that I have identified and decided we needed to have in our migration support library:

1. Support Windows versions without Visual Styles (typically non-XP and non-Vista versions)
2. Skin all Windows controls (including common controls: ListView, TreeView, TabControl, ...)
3. Skin all WinForms controls in the .NET library
4. Skin system forms and common dialogs (message box, file dialog, color dialog, ...)
5. Support standard msstyles files (there are thousands of skins available in msstyles format)
6. Skin individual forms in an application
7. Skin only the content of a form or only the frame
8. Skin custom and user defined controls
9. Can be enable/disables/configured on the fly at runtime
10. Skins can be saved as resources embedded in the application

The TD 5.1 skinning engine doesn't have most of the features I listed, it has a handful of predefined skins that are not compatible with Windows Visual Styles and cannot be personalized. DevExpress and Infragistics (both great libraries) skin only  their own controls and cannot integrate with standard WinForms or Windows controls. Windows Blinds and other skinning engines skin the entire machine and don't work with WinForms controls and Windows menus.

The good news is that I finally found the perfect component and we have acquired a OEM license to integrate it in the PPJ Framework. I will share the name of the company and the component when we complete the roadmap for '09 and '10 and announce it.

But I can preannounce that the PPJ Framework will introduce a new full skinning capabillity with all the features I listed above and more.

Gupta applications migrated to .NET using our solution will be able to be skinned with a simple switch, will run on older windows looking like a XP or Vista application, or just about anything else. You will have thousands of free skins to chose from or will be able to create your own.