How to: Change Visual Characteristics of Skins (Devices)
You can change a number of the visual characteristics of the skin.
Note
The term viewport describes the window area within the skin where the user interface of an application appears.
Note
The dialog boxes and menu commands you see might differ from those described in Help depending on your active settings or edition. To change your settings, choose Import and Export Settings on the Tools menu. For more information, see Visual Studio Settings.
To change the wording in the title bar of the Device Emulator
In the Skin Definition File, reword the titleBar element. For example:
titlebar = "My Device"
To change the location of the viewport within the skin
In the Skin Definition File, change the value assigned the x and y axes.
For example, the default Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition schema lists displayPosX="51" and displayPosY="47". When you increase the displayPosX value, you move the viewport to the right. When you increase the displayPoxY value, you move the viewport downward.
To change the height and width of the viewport
In the Skin Definition File, change the value assigned to the displayWidth and displayHeight elements.
For example, the default Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition schema lists displayWidth="240" and displayHeight="320". When you increase the value of displayWidth, the horizontal dimension of the viewport increases to the right. When you increase the value of displayHeight, the vertical dimension of the viewport increases downward.
To change the color depth of the viewport
In the Skin Definition File, change the value assigned to the displayDepth element.
For example, the default Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition schema lists displayDepth="16".
Note
Color depth, also called bit depth, represents the number of bits available to define a color for each pixel. Smart device skins typically have a color depth of 16.
To implement background transparency
Set the lower left pixel of the Up or Normal graphic file to the transparent color. Skins that Microsoft currently ships for Smartphone and Pocket PC use the color value FEFFFF for this purpose.
Note
Use this technique to make skins frameless. In other words, the Device Emulator and the graphic in the Visual Studio designer will be bounded by the visual elements of the skin, and not appear in a rectangle whose background color is probably not the same as that of the window in which the skin appears.