How can you make a .net windows forms project look fresh?

Question

I\'m working on a visual studio 2005 vb.net windows forms project that\'s been around for several years. It\'s full of default textboxes, labels, dropdowns, datagrids, datetime

Answer 1

You can subclass all the default controls and override their appearance. Admittedly, you will have to go thru the entire project and change all references of TextBox to MyTextBox, but all of the default properties and methods will still work. The same cannot be guaranteed if you go with a 3rd party vendor. The other advantage of this approach is you can pick one control at a time and perform an incremental upgrade of the application.