In the upcoming weeks until the official Q1 2010, we’ll be sharing with you the major highlights of the release – one piece at a time. So, stay tuned to this blog, check regularly www.telerik.com and follow us on Twitter for real time updates. The Q1 pre-release series start today with an overview of the new skin customization tool for WinForms. Enjoy!
New Visual Style Builder: Styling WinForms Applications Has Never Been Easier
A completely reengineered and updated version of Visual Style Builder – a skin customization tool for RadControls for WinForms – is coming officially to live with Telerik Q1 2010 release. The WinForms product team has gone to great lengths to ensure that the time needed to style your applications is brought to the bare minimum.
With the new Style Builder you can custom-style entire WinForms applications or individual controls in the blink of an eye. The tool’s revamped UI is a great relief from the endless hours of coding to achieve a fine-tuned design. The updated Visual Style Builder eliminates the need to know the basic structure of the WinForms controls. You can easily apply changes to RadControls’ states, styles or themes in general with intuitive visual selection and drag-and-drop.
An “industry first” addition to the Visual Style Builder is the so-called Style Repository. It is a style storage where all pre-defined or generated element styles and images are collected and can be reused on other controls. If styling WinForms applications took days before, it will now diminish this time to hours or even minutes! The best thing is that you will deliver customized, great looking applications, and will be able to allocate more time for the important functionality tasks.
RadControls for WinForms ship with a number of ready-to-use themes. In addition to creating new themes, the Visual Style Builder comes in handy if you need to customize existing themes and/or create custom skins to perfectly fit your design. Application consistency and swift styling is what the Visual Style Builder is all about.
If that piqued your curiosity you can read more on the Visual Style Builder page, in this blog post, or watch a video on Telerik TV.
About the author
Vassil Petev
Vassil Petev has been helping Telerik become the top .NET company it is today since early 2003. During this adventure, he has been involved in technical support and sales, in building the renowned Telerik support team, in the creation of the Public Issue Tracker, and in project-managing the Reporting and WinForms product lines. Today he works with the brightest marketing folks to promote the ever-growing DevCraft portfolio. He loves the great outdoors, yachting, house music, DJing, and skiing.
@RadControls