In my opinion the DevExpress Windows Forms Suite is the most advanced component suite for Windows Forms, but it comes at a price. Most of them work and are good on first look, but I never found a 100% complete project.Īnother approach is - and I hope you will choose that one - going for 3rd party libraries which already have made their way through the PInvoke-mud and implemented some custom forms you can use. I tried some of them in the past (google for 'C# custom title bar' for example). There are approaches on the web, like this one, for example. Maybe Windows comes up with new ways, and you have to reimplement then or your users will blame you one day. These are things you have to know and support in the future.

And don't underestimate that there are several ways to maximize a form, for example: Can you handle all of them? So, there's the click on the 'Maximize' button, a doubleclick on your title bar or dragging the title bar to the top of the screen. The downside is that you have to handle the resizing, minimizing, maximizing, and closing all by yourself. The good thing: No PInvokes for painting in the non-client-area. Then you have the full control of your form and its title. There's a thing you can do quite quickly without third-party libraries, but it is quite hard to do right, be warned: Creating a borderless form ( FormBoderStyle=None) and handle things by yourself, like resizing. If you want to know more about the non-client-area, check out Vista Aero ToolStrip on Non-Client Area. The border and title bar stuff is called the non-client-area and even if it is possible, it is not fun to paint in there, because you have to care for a lot of stuff like activated/deactivated windows, mouse-effects and of course Windows-version specific things like Aero effects, the DWM manager, visual effects (available or not), RDP/Citrix and other remote/virtualization rendering settings, etc. Basically, everything you can draw is inside of the client area, which is the forms bounds except the borders and the title bar.

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