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Awhile back I was working on a mock-up of a simple WinForms application and wanted to “take it to the next level”. You know, polish it up and look “professional”.

I searched around for some tips and ran across the Krypton Toolkit, a control library full of slick WinForms controls. Even better is the fact that the Krypton Toolkit is available absolutely free.

All of the controls are skinnable and provide a nice visual look-n-feel. If you don’t like the color or style of something, you can change it with the included palette editor application.

Perhaps my favorite control is the incredibly flexible KryptonHeaderGroup. Without writing any code (doing everything in the designer with the Properties pane), you can create collapsible header and footer panels. For example (using one of the included samples), two content panels can be hidden by clicking on the arrow in the corner:

This really opened up a lot of new possibilities for my user interface, since I had some toolbars and buttons that I wanted the user to be able to see sometimes, and hide whenever they weren’t using them.

The controls really speak for themselves, but I can’t mention the Krypton Toolkit without mentioning the helpful forums. Phil Wright, the main (only?) developer, goes out of his way to help users of the controls on the forums.

If you need a custom control to match the Krypton look-and-feel, there are lots of extensibility points where you can take advantage of the Krypton palette functionality in your own controls. It’s a really well thought-out framework.

So, if you’re looking for an easy way to spice up your software and really put that polished touch on things, I’d highly recommend checking out the Krypton Toolkit. It really made a difference in my demo.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated in any way with Component Factory and am not profiting in any way from this post. Just throwing this out there since I had a really good experience with the Krypton Toolkit and thought someone may find this helpful. I know I did.

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