Look And Feel
- 2 minutes to read
All the .NET controls and components developed by DevExpress support the Look and Feel scheme. This lets you provide a consistent look and feel across different controls, making the process of customizing their appearance much easier.
Unlike the Appearance mechanism, the Look and Feel determines the overall painting scheme for the control(s). It specifies how control headers, scrollbars, borders, buttons and other visual elements are painted, but it doesn’t contain appearance settings (font attributes, foreground and background colors, text alignment and word wrap and trimming options). The appearance settings can be customized with the Appearance mechanism that involves using Appearance objects.
The Look and Feel mechanism allows you to apply one of the predefined painting schemes to:
- a specific DevExpress control(s);
- all the controls within a form (when using the XtraForm form);
- all the controls in your application.
Currently the following painting schemes are available: Flat, UltraFlat, Style3D, WindowsXP, Office2003 and Skin. The following image shows an XtraTabControl control painted using Skin and WindowsXP painting schemes.
Note, however, that certain controls (such as XtraGrid, NavBarControl, XtraTabControl) extend this standard set of painting schemes by introducing new schemes that are specific only to this control. For instance, the XtraTabControl control provides the following additional painting schemes: Standard and PropertyView. These additional schemes can be selected with the control’s XtraTabControl.PaintStyleName property. If this property is set to a Default value, then the control is painted using the painting scheme imposed by the look and feel object.
For more information, refer to the sections below.