Skins in VB?

[vvmanoj]

How do I use skins in a VB application? Are there any good sites to check for this particular topic?

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[dighn]

VB does not have native support for skins. You would have to write your own skin system.

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[namgor]

hm... you can change color such as active windows color, but that's window's skin not VB skin

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[reklis]

Originally posted by dighn:
You would have to write your own skin system.

Precisely. However, something like Winamp shouldn't be that hard for any moderately skilled VB programmer to accomplish though.

All you'd have to do is design an open framework of importing images (BMP/JPEG/GIF) on top of your program. Each control would have it's own image. The images would be read from a directory/zipfile some place, they would need to design a naming system for the images (button1.gif, button2.gif). Each of the images would need to be a certain width, height, etc. When the program launches, it loads the current images ontop of all the controls. Kind of like getting dressed before leaving the house http://www.sharkyforums.com/ubb/smile.gif

With significantly more effort, you could develop something that would allow you to place the controls anywhere you wanted. This would allow for far greater customization! A simple config file would need to be provided along with the images. It would need to describe the size, shape, and position of all the controls, as well as the images they will use to "get dressed". This config file would need to be parsed, and then that information would be used to move all the controls to their appropriate places, then slap on the images. The reason it's so much more complex to do it this way, is because there are many more things that can go wrong parsing config files, and moving controls around than when you're just placing images on things.



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[reklis]

For the record, I would not recommend the latter of my above recommendations to a Visual Basic program, and would suggest dipping into C++ via COM.

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