Windows XP Visual Style Support

Windows Forms 2.0 has broadly increased the level of visual style support. As the picture above shows, the designer now supports visual styles. The Windows Forms runtime has also been changed so that controls render with visual styles by default. It is no longer necessary to set the FlatStyle property on controls to FlatStyle.System to get visual styles.

The known issues with the Application.EnableVisualStyles method have been addressed and default Windows Applications created with Visual Studio 2005 have a call to this method.

Information about the current visual style is available in the new VisualStyleInformation class and finally, drawing visual style parts can be accomplished using the new VisualStyleRenderer class, or the high-level, control-based renderer classes (ButtonRenderer, TabRenderer, etc).