Themes for WinForms Overview

In This Topic

Themes for WinForms makes it easy to theme your WinForms controls with many built-in themes and an easy to use Theme designer to create your own themes or modify the existing ones. This product enables you to easily provide a consistent customized look to WinForms applications which use other ComponentOne WinForms products such as C1Ribbon, C1Scheduler, C1FlexGrid and others. Themes for WinForms includes one component, C1ThemeController, and a Theme designer.

The C1Themes product physically consists of two separate parts:

C1.Win.C1Themes assembly

This assembly provides the C1ThemeController component, which is used to load and apply themes to controls at design and runtime. Besides, the assembly contains (as embedded resources) a set of predefined themes which can be used as is, or customized to better serve your purposes. Projects using this assembly need to have a reference to C1.C1Zip dll.

C1.Win.C1Themes.Extended assembly

This assembly provides the C1ThemePicker control, which can be dropped from the toolbox to the form. The C1ThemePicker control represents a drop-down list to select one of the registered themes and apply it to the assigned C1ThemeController.

C1ThemeDesigner application

This application can be used to create new, or customize existing themes (including those embedded into the C1.Win.C1Themes assembly as mentioned above).

Key Features

C1Themes allow to provide a consistent customized look to your applications that use ComponentOne WinForms controls.
The look of an application can be changed with a single click at design or run time.
The look of your applications can be designed/modified by visual designers (not programmers) independently of actual coding, using the easy to use C1ThemeDesigner.
Use one of the pre-built themes, or create your own either from scratch, or by modifying a pre-built theme.
Themes can be deployed independently of applications, and used by different applications throughout your company as long as the applications are built using C1 WinForms controls.
Within a theme, a common repository of properties (Base Theme Properties) can be referenced throughout the theme to enable creation of consistent and easily modifiable themes.
The user can add a Theme Combo Box to switch between multiple themes at run-time. To know more, refer the C1ThemePicker topic.

Note: ComponentOne Themes for WinForms is compatible with both .NET and .NET Framework.

API References
C1.Win.C1Themes .NET Framework Assembly	C1.Win.Themes .NET Assembly