Stylesheets for .NET Windows Controls

Question

Hello

I was wondering is there any option of using Stylesheets for .NET Windows controls ?

If not, which is the best way to make the UI look consistent.I need to use VS 2005 to make

the changes in the UI.

Regards

Answer 1

you can use Stylesheets in web pages only not in Windows controls.

Answer 2

Well guess he's talking about WinForms. Then you cant use Stylesheets. Havnt coded that much of WinForms. But guess you could have an "Settings/sheet" class that have properties of different style you are using and then set them when creating your controls.

Answer 3

If you want to make your UI consistent and pretty, why don't you give WPF a try? You will be able to organize your styles in resource dictionary, then reference to it in all the other projects.

Answer 4

We derive usercontrols from all controls in our system -- all the derived classes do is set the style from a central list of constants defining colours and fonts. Then we use these controls on our WinForms for a consistent look and feel. If we want to change the style, we just change the list of constants. This also allows is to perform UI tricks like setting the background colour of controls to a different colour when they are being edited.

Answer 5

Even ASP.NET controls, which ultimately render HTML, are notoriously CSS-unfriendly. The reason is that they use tables extensively for layout, and they set a lot of inline style tags which of course do not honor the style sheet. Some work has been done to create wrappers for these controls, but it was incomplete the last I looked.

It's a shame, but our team will not use the out-of-the box controls most of the time. We've rolled our own and packaged them into an internal library. While the Microsoft controls would have been very useful, they simply don't meet our criteria for clean, accessible, styleable HTML.

Microsoft seems, finally, after something like 10 years, to have realized that this is important to a modern development team. The control output of ASP.NET MVC is far cleaner and behaves itself quite well with respect to CSS. Whether they'll eventually revisit the core ASP.NET controls is anyone's guess.