We now have a custom renderer that draws in to Office 2007 style and is used for the Blue, Silver and Black built in palettes.

It draws the MenuStrip, ToolStrip, StatusStip and ContextMenuStrip appropriately. Here is a simple example of the Blue scheme with a menu showing.

The renderer is not using fixed colors, they are being pulled in from the palette and so you can customize the colors using the ToolMenuStatus properties of the KryptonPalette. Not many people will need to make use of this ability but it is there if you need it.

Here I have updated three colors in order to get my highlighted menu items in a shade of purple instead of the usual yellow. Not sure it will catch on though!

Right, I am off on a two week vacation to Europe and so so this will be my last post for a little while. But once I get back it will be onto the final stage, adding the custom chrome.

Stage 1 of adding the Office 2007 look and feel is complete. All the existing set of Krypton controls including the Navigator now have appropriate appearance for the three new palettes.

Now to start working on the renderer for the toolstrips. It needs to take the colors from the palette and renderer in the correct style. It also needs to work when you customize the colors in the KryptonPalette.

Every so often you do something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but later turns out to be a moment of madness. Last weekend I had just such a moment.

I was walking around an indoor market looking at the various stalls and came across one that puts custom wording on baseball caps. Just for fun I thought I would get one with my company name on it.

Once I got home I realised this was pretty pointless as I could never actually wear it outside the house. Anyone seeing it will think I am a corporate drone for wearing a company cap outside of work. They will also have never heard of the name and so assume I make widgets in a manufacturing factory.

Here is a picture of the said cap on the head of the single corporate employee.

I have often been called a code monkey but always assumed it was in reference to my coding skills. Seems I was mistaken.

After a short diversion by other tasks I am back at the helm and adding the Office 2007 look and feel to the Krypton components.

I only have another few days of work before I am on my annual vacation for two weeks but that should be enough to get a decent chunk completed. I have started by adding three palettes to the library that are used for the Blue, Silver and Black color schemes of Office 2007.

For comparison here is a picture of the different button states using the existing Professional – Office 2003 and Professional – System palettes.

The next picture shows the new Blue and Silver color schemes (I have implemented the Black color scheme it is so similar to the Silver that it is not presented here). Note that all the screen shots here are reduced in quality by converting to .gif and the real images are much better.

The above is for the Standalone button style. The Navigator button style that will be used in the Krypton Navigator stack modes has the following appearance.

The implementation takes two color values and then performs the drawing based on those values. I could have implemented it much quicker by just using bitmaps and stretching them to fit the area. But that would not have worked well for very large button sizes and also would prevent you from supplying your own color values to get an alternative color scheme but with the same glass affect.

I started with the KryptonButton because it was the control with the largest number of states and so one of the most difficult to get right. The other controls should be quicker and easier to setup.