Applying stylesheets to VB.net form controls

Question

I'm using a Windows Form Application in Visual Studio 2013 to design a prototype for a software. I'm not a software-developer, the only purpose of the project is to communicate with the dev-team to let them know what the end-product is supposed to look like.

There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing control, like buttons, textboxes, etc. so I was wondering if it is possible to attach stylesheets to VB.NET projects? Thank you

Answer 1

There is not really much flexibility when it comes to designing control, like buttons, textboxes, etc.

NO. winforms is a really old technology that basically has no amount of built-in support for custom UIs. It is not recommended for any new projects (only to maintain legacy applications) and it will be completely useless if you're not a developer, since any sort of custom look and feel needs to be done with an ugly procedural code technique called "owner draw", which requires too much code for anything, and is unable to provide professional-looking UIs due to the lack of hardware acceleration and lack of support for pixel-independent UIs.

If you're doing a prototype (as opposed to a real application), as others have recommended, you should use design tools such as Photoshop, or maybe a quick HTML + CSS kind of approach.

Otherwise, you can easily create a modern-looking application using a technology that is the replacement of winforms, called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, for short.

There's also a design tool made specifically for this technology, called Expression Blend, which is bundled with recent versions of Visual Studio, and offers a very designer-centric approach to building UIs:

To summarize: winforms is useless. Use proper, relevant, current technology instead.