This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Jon Box. Original Post: Windows XP: Enabling Visual Styles Feed Title: Jon Box's Weblog Feed URL: http://radio-weblogs.com/0126569/rss.xml Feed Description: This is a log of my findings and amusements with .NET. I also present information on my presentations and others that I see. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Jon Box Latest Posts From Jon Box's Weblog

In the near future, you will hear more about Visual Styles, a cool UI feature in Windows XP.  This feature makes your WinForm applications look professional by doing just a few steps: 1) enable VisualStyles via various mechanisms and 2) set controls with a FlatStyle property to "System".

Enable Visual Styles
In v1.1 of the .NET Framework, you can call EnableVisualStyles like the following:

This usage has issues as some of screens in an app that I did generated strange,sporadic runtime errors.  When I commented the EnableVisualStyles line out, it worked fine.  Some folks also prescribed to add a DoEvents before this as done in the sample.  See http://www.syncfusion.com/faq/winforms/search/1046.asp for other thoughts and an example in C#.   

Due to unsolved strange errors continuing, I finally went away from this and am using a manifest file.  It’s so easy because you just take the below text and put into a file with a name of “YourApp.EXE.Manifest” in your execution directory.  That is all there is to it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
    <description>tester</description>
    <dependency>
        <dependentAssembly>
            <assemblyIdentity type="win32" name="Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls"  version="6.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="X86" publicKeyToken="6595b64144ccf1df"   language="*" />      
        </dependentAssembly>
    </dependency>
</assembly>

Setting the Controls
Also, don’t forget to change all controls that have a FlatStyle property to the “System” value.  If you do this through the property window, it generates the following:
Me.LabelGreeting.FlatStyle = System.Windows.Forms.FlatStyle.System

Also, check out Mr. Hanselman's thoughts on this.