I am creating tabs in C#'s TabControl, and while that is very easy to do, they are extremely ugly. I did some searching around the internet and found a company that sells graphical improvements to various GUI components in .NET, but that costs $400. Given that I am working on a master's project, that is out of the question, does anybody have any other suggestions for "prettying" up the tabs. Thanks.
Edit: My mistake - I forgot to put that I am using Windows.Forms.
Can we assume you are using Windows Forms at this point? I suggest maybe looking into WPF instead. The WPF toolkit on codeplex has a very nice Ribbon Control which might be a good substitute for the standard tab control.
my tabs look fine, what's your beef?
post a picture or your 'ugly' tabs, and post a picture of what you think 'pretty' tabs should look like; owner-drawn controls can do a lot...
but if this is for your thesis, unless your thesis is on graphical design, "pretty" tabs are probably a waste of time!
If you're going the free route, try the following:
The WPF suggestion above is also valid -- it's free and you can make it look nice fairly easily . The downside is there is some ramp-up if you're not familiar with the technology.
The place to look for free code for .NET is codeproject.
A quick search there found this nice looking tab control (in WinForms): http://www.codeproject.com/KB/tabs/KRBTabControl.aspx
No need for WPF quite yet...