Shaped Forms without a line of code

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Introduction

First of all, I am a newbie at C#. I started it from only two days ago so, sorry for the experts if they didn’t like my article or didn’t find anything useful here. But I think there is some one who may need it to improve his application's interface. The trick is same as the technique which is used at the movies to make the actors do the scene at a room the walls of which is painted with a illuminated color, then the graphic designers put another scene of a forest or a planet or any place else, this is how it works for us.

The first step is to make the required Form graphics by any graphics tool (I usually use the Photoshop). The form graphics must have the background color as illuminated green because this color can be easily grouped and deleted without deleting any edges of the shape you want. In other words, if we used non illuminated color, the dark edges of the shape will be deleted with the background color.

Any way the work will show how it is done, as I did in my sample. You can see what I was saying:

But the main problem is that Visual studio needs the same exact color as the background and if you mismatched this rule, the background color will stick to your form. If we take a closer view of our painted form, you can see a small difference at a point on the curved edges:

The Visual Studio considers it as a different color than the background, so it leaves it without deleting and it looks very awful at your form as:

So try to eliminate all different colors from your graphic before using it. Now another thing …. When you save your background color, try to make the background color take a little space from it because the VS considers it as a part of the form although it eliminates it.

Now save your work as .bmp file and open VS.NET. Make a project that contains a C# empty form and start modifying it as the following:

Add the button and the label you want and adjust the form properties as the following:

• BackgroundImage: your background with extension .bmp
• FormBorderStyle: None
• TransparencyKey: Web, then choose Lime

Adjust the Button properties as the following:

• BackColor: Web, then choose White Smoke
• Text: OK

Adjust the Label properties as the following:

• BackColor: Web, then choose Transparent
• FlatStyle: Popup

Add this code to the button1_Click function:

Application.Exit();

If you want your form moveable, you can use the code at Jibin's article (Interactive Shaped Forms). That is all.