I’ve finished the task of getting the Office 2007 color schemes looking correct for a custom chrome window. It also allows a great deal of customization which I hope will be useful to people.
Here is the Office 2007 Blue color scheme with the mouse hovering over one of the form level buttons.
Notice that the form has detected the use of a StatusStrip at the bottom of the client area and has merged it into the border areas. This gives a close approximation to Office 2007.
The caption area of the form is actually drawn using a Krypton header element. If you are familiar with the existing KryptonHeader control you will know it can draw three values, an image, text and extra text. For our form the image becomes the icon in the caption area, the text is the main caption text and extra text allows some more text to be shown.
By setting the form level ExtraText property you can get another string into the caption. Here is the Silver scheme showing this.
Also like the KryptonHeader you can define ButtonSpec instances so that extra buttons are added to the caption area. Here I have used the form level ButtonSpecs collection to add a red certificate.
The form exposes StateCommon, StateActive and StateInactive properties that allow you to customize the border, background and header parts of the custom chrome.
Here I have changed the color of the text and extra text strings, altered the font for the extra text and indicated the extra certification button should be placed on the near edge.
If you want to completely change the appearance then you can do that. Here is a rather ugly green look I created in a few seconds.
I did not bother altering all the colors for the menu, tool and status strips but you can do that as well using a KryptonPalette, so that the entire application is consistent.
Next up is to start testing and investigating it under different operating systems. I need check W2K, Server 2003 and Vista (with Aero and in Basic mode).
