Going from Blue to Tan

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Brett asks:

During the PDC we chatted about how to make the toolbar have the same look and feel that the toolbar in Visual Studio has (namely the tan gradients as opposed to the blue ones) and you mentioned you would be posting on that soon ... so, I was wondering ... if you had any idea when that post would be online!?

Thanks for reminding me! 

Turning off the Blue and Orange

If you just want to always use system colors, you can force the ToolStrip to stop picking colors based off the theme globally by:

ToolStripManager.VisualStylesEnabled = false;

Or per-toolstrip:

ProfessionalColorTable professionalColorTable = new ProfessionalColorTable();
professionalColorTable.UseSystemColors = true;
toolStrip1.Renderer = new ToolStripProfessionalRenderer(professionalColorTable);

Matching Visual Studio's scheme

Here's a sample of how to replace a color table in your ToolStripProfessionalRenderer so you can get away from the stock blue colors if blue is not your thing.

The main concept here is that the ToolStripProfessionalRenderer creates Pens and Brushes based on a color table that is replacable. By inheriting from the ProfessionalColorTable, you can change all of the 40 some odd colors available to you.

The code to set in the tan color table is:

ToolStripManager.Renderer = new ToolStripProfessionalRenderer(new TanColorTable());

Or you can specify one specific toolstrip's renderer:

ToolStrip.Renderer = new ToolStripProfessionalRenderer(new TanColorTable());

Note that if you are a package within Visual Studio, the Visual Studio Core team still recommends using the Command Bar technology - this allows your toolbars to feed into the commanding system as well as their extensibility model.  If your code lives in Visual Studio and after careful consideration you feel you must use a ToolStrip, try fetching the "VsRenderer" or the "VsColorTable" out of the IUIService.Styles dictionary. The PropertyGrid has a new protected property which allows you to specify a custom renderer.

Hope this helps you get started!