barney

I have been working on a program in vb for about 3 months. Now i am sick and
tired of the gray that is the defalt of the program. Is there any way to add
skins to the program? where users can select the type they whant?

barney

Sure there is! (VB wouldn't want you living in a grey only world now...)
And it's sooo easy even *I* could give you the answer, so take heart.


Here's all you need to do:
Go into the VB project you are creating.
Go to any form or control and look in the properties window.
You will find color properties like "BackColor" and "FillColor"
Select one of these and you will see a down arrow to the right.
When you click on that you get a little pallette, but notice that it is
tabbed...
Click in the System Tab, you get stuff like Button Face, etc.
Set some stuff to those colors. (Don't get too carried away...)
Now resize your IDE so you can see your Windows wallpaper
(assuming you are at least in Win95 or better) right click, choose
properties.
Go to the appearance tab.
You will find a drop-down named "Item" those correspond (roughly) to the
list in VB that you saw earlier. You change the color to the left.
Or you can just click in the little illustration at the top to select from
the "Item" drop-down.
The easiest way to make a change is to just pick a Scheme. When you OK or
Apply, go back and run your app. It should be a chamelean just like the
rest of Windows now....


Hope it works for you (I at least knew what I was *trying* to describe...)
Michael Kelsey

barney

I believe what Thomas was actually looking for is a way to use "skins", much
like (if not exactly) Winamp and other MP3 players. These are not a color
scheme per se but they are more like a pattern or texture created in a
graphics program such as Photoshop that you then apply to the app. That way
you are not limited to hexadecimal colors, you could use a texture of sand
and make your app look like the beach (this is a poor example but its the
only one I can think of, hehe). I imagine it would be possible but I dont
know how (hope someone does because I get tired of the boring hex colors
too).


Justin

barney

I think that the only way to implement skins properly is probably to create
customised pictures of every object and then replace the real objects with
image controls, implementing their actions yourself. A lot of work.


-- Jamie Webb