WinForms — New Winter Joy Vector Skin

2021 is slowly coming to an end. We at DevExpress would like to wish you all the very best in the coming year. As a small token of our appreciation, we’ve created a new Winter Joy vector-based skin/theme for our WinForms product line. This new skin includes three built-in palettes: a default palette with subdued colors, a dark palette inspired by the magic of holiday-season evenings, and a palette inspired by snow covered landscapes.

Important Note: This skin will not be included in our primary component distribution. If you wish to incorporate this new skin/theme in your WinForms project, you will need to install the NuGet package to add it to your project. Run the following command in the Visual Studio's Package Manager Console:

Install-Package DevExpress.Win.WinterJoySkin

You can also download this package from NuGet.org or inspect its source code at GitHub.com.

Once you install the package, simply register the skin library at the application startup. And finally, before you can use this skin/theme, you will need to upgrade/use v21.1.7+ or v21.2.4+.

[STAThread]
static void Main() {
    // Register the Winter Joy skin.
    System.Reflection.Assembly asm = typeof(DevExpress.UserSkins.WinterJoy).Assembly; 
    DevExpress.Skins.SkinManager.Default.RegisterAssembly(asm); 
    // Apply the skin.
    DevExpress.XtraEditors.WindowsFormsSettings.DefaultLookAndFeel.
        SetSkinStyle("Winter Joy");
    //
    Application.Run(...);
}

Once again, we wish all of you the best this holiday season.

Before You Go – We Need Your Feedback for Future Skin/Theme Development

As you can imagine, creating new skins/themes is a time consuming process. One reason we did not include Winter Joy in our core distribution is to help determine usage rate for specialty skins such as this. To help us frame our WinForms skin/theme development strategy in 2022, please take a moment to answer the following survey: