Introduction

Although the .NET framework provides quite a rich collection of UI controls and components for WinForms development, there is one particular control that's been missing. I'm talking about a color-picker control with drop-down color selection capabilities, just like the one used within the Visual Studio .NET property browser for editing Color-typed properties.

Of course, there is the standard ColorDialog component, but the drop-down color selector is more user-friendly, IMHO. (Should I say cool?)

Based on these observations, I've decided to implement a ColorPicker control with the following features:

• The control should look and act like a button.
• The button should be colored with the currently selected color and, optionally, it should display the currently selected color's name.
• Clicking the button should drop-down the built-in WinForms color selector and the control should change its appearance to a "pushed down" look.

The main design goals were implementation simplicity and the ability to reuse the control in either binary, or in source code form (VB.NET source code; just include the ColorPicker.vb file into your project and you're done).

The demo application

The following is the important part of the ColorPicker's public contract (the semantics should be self-explanatory):

Namespace LaMarvin.Windows.Forms

Public Class ColorPicker Inherits Control
    Public Event ColorChanged As EventHandler
    Public Property Color() As Color

For those of you in a hurry, you can download the control along with an accompanying demo application here.

But wait!

If you want to learn something about the inner workings of the WinForms design-time support, as well as some undocumented .NET framework tricks, please, read on.