fancy windows forms

[sclement]

My boss at work, has asked me to make my 2 software products a bit easier on the eye, add some shading, fancy color schemes etc.

This is somehting I have always struggled with. Has anybody got any links to some basic winform design guidelines, graphical style guidelines ?

One thing I am considering is some of the 3rd party libraries like devexpress, however this does not appear to be a quick solution, as it seem to involve replacing existing controls with the fancier ones.

Any information would be greatly appreciated

simon

[BigEd781]

DevExpress does make good controls. As for style policies, they are implicitly described by the look and feel of the default controls. I personally dislike applications that go out of their way to look very different than all of the other Windows applications that I use (i.e., iTunes for Windows). Making things look a little nicer by writing your own controls or using third party controls is one things, and I realize that you may have no choice here, but I think that different applications should maintain some consistency in their look and behavior.

[adrian.cantu]

If you are looking for specific UI guidelines, check out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

...even though MS doesnt follow their own guidelines...

btw, http://windowsclient.net/ has a lot of resources/examples/videos on how to customize applications. Click on the Learn tab