steepvalley.net: XP Common Controls [XPCC]

steepvalley.net: XP Common Controls

"When I was starting to develop in VS.net I wanted that nice XP-Look for all of my Programs. The problem is, that VS.net 2003 shipped without most of them. The most missed controls where the Taskbox/Taskbar control and the Grouped ListView Contol.

I ran into some implementations of some of the controls on the internet (namely vbAccelerator and the TaskVision Sample on http://www.windowsforms.net ) and into a document provided by Microsoft named "Windows XP Design Guidelines" . This document provides detailed information on some of the new controls and I started to recreate some of these controls for VS.net (with hints and help from the sites mentioned above - thank you again!)

The one feature I wanted to have with the XP Controls was theming. But since it always needed some direct dll calls to uxtheme.dll I wrote my own theming dll. This has some positive and some negative effects.

Positive:

It runs on any OS that supports the .net-Framework; means it will run on non-XP Systems like Win95 and Win2000. That said, I must also tell you that the theme listener and the grouping and tiling of the XPListGroup won’t work without Win XP.

..."

Man I can't believe I've not posted about this before. These are some very cool looking .Net UI components.

You can find the list of components here.

And it has a great license.
"The controls plus the source code are completely free to use. There are no cost at all attached to this project. "

More stuff to play with. :)

(via Code/Tea/Etc. - Free XP Themed Windows Forms Controls)