Editor Appearance

One of my gripes with the XAGE Editor was that the toolstrip looked bad on Vista - a sickly pale colour as opposed to XP's vibrant blue. It seems to be a recurring problem for Winforms developers.

When looking for solutions for this I came across a useful, free component framework, Krypton Toolkit, which is a lot more lightweight than the likes of DevExpress but looks good and seems to perform pretty well. I've spent the last few evenings making the Editor play nicely with it - there are a few workarounds due to various limitations, but I'm now at the stage where I'm satisfied it has been worth the effort:



I like it. It has a smooth WPF-esque feel about it whilst still being plain old Winforms. The new Editor Appearance preference allows the end user to choose between a number of presets. If I get the time I'll add a few custom ones - for novelty value alone I'm interested to see how it looks in an eye-watering pink.