Customizing Skins (Devices)

A skin is a graphic that surrounds the rectangular form, the viewport, of an application in the Device Emulator or Visual Studio Designer. When you use a skin during application development, you can better visualize how your application looks on a real device. You can use the same skins in Visual Studio designers and the Device Emulator.

Besides providing visual enhancement, skins can provide functionality, such as the processing of mouse events for hardware buttons and softkeys.

Note

If the skin files installed with Visual Studio become corrupted, you can reinstall them by repairing your Visual Studio installation. For more information, see How to: Repair Visual Studio.

In This Section

• Skin Technology (Devices)
  Describes the XML Skin Definition File and graphic file requirements for skins.

• How to: Create Skin Files (Devices)
  Describes the steps for creating a simple skin.

• How to: Change Visual Characteristics of Skins (Devices)
  Describes modifications you can make to the Skin Definition File to affect the title bar of the emulator, the location and dimension of the viewport, and whether the skin appears in a frame, or transparency.

• How to: Process Mouse Events (Devices)
  Describes using color mapping to specify areas of the skin, also known as hotspots, that can respond to mouse events.

• How to: Expose Tooltips (Devices)
  Describes how to provide ToolTips for skin hotspots.

• How to: Use Skins with the Device Emulator
  Describes options available in the Device Emulator user interface, such as the choice of a skin, how to save the skin with an OS image, and how to show or hide ToolTips.

• How to: Use Skins with Visual Studio (Devices)
  Describes options available in the Visual Studio user interface, such as setting defaults, specifying resolution, enabling rotation, and other properties.

• Skin Definition File Details (Devices)
  Describes and gives sample values for the individual elements, both required and optional, that appear in a Skin Definition File.

• Skin Definition File Example (Devices)
  Presents a complete Skin Definition File.

Related Sections

• Design Considerations for Smart Device Development
  Includes a summary of available project types and guidance about how to select the appropriate language for your project.

• Mobile Developer Center
  Links to the Windows Mobile Developer Center which includes resources for mobile development.