Changing system colors for a single application (Windows, .NET)

Question

I know I should generally avoid messing up with such system settings, but my application do already use nonstandard colors and I have no influence on that. I would like to be able to add standard .NET controls in some places, but their colors do not match. I would like to have a hack that would replace system colors for this one application. One more important thing to note is that it is a .NET application.

My (incomplete) ideas so far were:

• To create a proxy User32.dll library with replaced GetSysColor, but it would be very tedious (731 functions to be redirected, 1 to be replaced) and I do not know how to force my application to use that particular copy.
• To intercept somehow invocations to GetSysColors (unfortunatelly it is somewhere in the CLR I think).
• To modify somehow .NET class SystemColors (in memory? is it possible?).

Do you have any idea, what is the best (and complete) way to achieve this?

Answer 1

In my early days I developed a program that registered a global message hook to owner draw window borders - I could theme all windows. This should be possible for a single application, too. However, this is not a simple task.

Otherwise I don't think that this will be possible. How about using themable third party controls such as Krypton Toolkit?

Answer 2

I would like to be able to add standard .NET controls in some places, but their colors do not match. I would like to have a hack that would replace system colors for this one application.

That's like driving a nail with a sledgehammer.

Rather than mucking up colors within the system itself, what you can do is inherit a new control from each of the stock controls you want to use. So instead of a plain TextBox you inherit from the stock TextBox control to create your own ThemedTextBox. You setup this new control to use your app's color scheme by default, and because it is still a TextBox as far as the inheritance structure is concerned you can use it anywhere you'd use a normal textbox, including in the winforms designer.

Answer 3

My team decided to use this:
http://www.skin-soft.co.uk/
Works perfectly at the cost of 189$. We only had to add a script adding the skin-soft code only on our build machine. Local builds do not use custom colors, but in this way we only pay for a single license.