I'm working on a visual studio 2005 vb.net windows forms project that's been around for several years. It's full of default textboxes, labels, dropdowns, datagrids, datetime pickers -- all the standard stuff. The end result is a very gray, old-looking project.
What would be the best approach to making this project look fresh and snazzy? I'd rather not rewrite the entire solution with all brand new forms objects, but would that be avoidable?
Hi Jeffrey,
This depends on how the existing "gray old looking" project is structured in terms of code. For example, is data access code separated from the UI in a Data Access Layer, is the business logic in a Business Logic Layer? If yes, then cleaning the UI for a snazzy look should be relatively simple.
If everything is all there in the "Button Click" event, then a rewrite is the only way in my humble opinion as otherwise it will just be too time consuming trying to work with the existing code base.
Cheers
This isn't so much an "answer" as an opinion.
I tried to jazz up a WinForms project I created back a few years ago by giving the forms a fancy blue gradient background etc, and it looked pretty good on XP. But then on Vista it looked out of place. Taking away any custom painting and reverting the form to "battleship gray" made it look much better IMHO.
I'm seeing a lot of applications (particularly from MS) coming out with custom window chrome etc, and all it does is detract from the nice sense of consistency that Windows gives.
I guess what I'm saying is that you don't need to worry too much about making your application look fashionable. If you keep your colours based on the SystemColors enumeration then Windows can do that for you.
You can subclass all the default controls and override their appearance. Admittedly, you will have to go thru the entire project and change all references of TextBox to MyTextBox, but all of the default properties and methods will still work. The same cannot be guaranteed if you go with a 3rd party vendor. The other advantage of this approach is you can pick one control at a time and perform an incremental upgrade of the application.
What would be the best approach to making this project look fresh and snazzy?
IMHO the best thing you can do is make sure the controls are logically ordered, and have ample spacing between them, and add groupboxes / labels / etc where appropriate.
If you try and change the 'sea of gray' that is the default color scheme, your app will just end up looking crap.
I recommend purchasing a good 3rd-party control library - Infragistics and DevExpress, are just a couple. Most of these libraries give you the ability to drop in new compatible controls on top of your existing ones - for example, you can replace the default EditBox with an enhanced version. They also give you access to some of the snazzy new UIs such as Ribbon, or the Outlook-style navigator people are always wanting.
The reason I specifically recommend using one of these libraries is that they were designed to be relatively easy to use in existing applications, you get support, a community, and all sorts of upgrade paths/options.
The downside: money.
One other thing to also check is that your controls have the FlatStyle property set to System instead of Standard.
What this will do is make sure that the app uses the system defaults for radio buttons, standard buttons and the like. This takes all your apps from the flat Win 2000 look and gives them the XP or Vista bling depending on the OS they are running.