[2008] Where can I find free components GUI?

[ahmedwk]

where can I find free controls to build nice GUI?

[Shaggy Hiker]

Aside from the ones that come with Visual Studio? What types of controls are you looking for?

[kleinma]

My guess is he is looking for fancy eye candy type controls.

The reality is there may be some floating around, but the majority of the really nice ones cost a good buck. While not always the case, most of the time, the "get what you pay for" quote fits well when it comes to custom 3rd party components, especially UI ones.

Aside from buying them, a number of stock .NET controls can be either totally, or partially owner drawn, which means you can modify how the control is painted on the screen, to make it look "nicer".

Another option, since you are using VS2008, if you are using .NET 3.5, you can make your UI in WPF instead of WinForms. WPF is much easier to make nicer looking UIs, but it comes at a steep learning curve because its structure is much different than WinForms.

Yet another option is to just use standard windows controls like Shaggy mentioned. I am a fan of this one, because usually custom UI controls try to be so different from standard controls, they become hard to use.

[techgnome]

SteepValley.net
CodePlex.com
Dacris.com

are some of the ones I've used in the past with varying success.... SteepValley and Dacris are (or were, haven't used them in a while) supported pretty well... CodePlex is a carp shoot as it's a .NET targeted Open Source site (it wants to be like SourceForge, but strictly with .NET ... and it's sponsored by MS).

-tg

[dee-u]

DevExpress
VBAccelerator.com
CodeProject.com
PlanetSourceCode.com