An aspect of my work that I both love and hate is that I do all of the graphic design work. And one thing I'm finding out is that there's a lot of graphic design work required to make professional, good-looking Windows Forms applications. A lot of that work is in creating icons and small images, a subject on which I want to do a tutorial on when I get the time.
This post is a simple tip on setting the color of a Windows object and using Photoshop to improve the process. In the screenshot below I'm setting a background color of a RichTextBox control and want a custom color. VS2005's color picker is great, but it only goes so far. You also may want to use a custom color not in the VS.NET default palette. So I reduce the size of VS.NET, pop over to Photoshop CS (shown at bottom) and pick the color, typically some color I'll have already defined as a Photoshop swatch. The Red-Blue-Green values are in view (circled in red) as I type them into the RichTextBox BackColor property window (in blue.) Beats the heck out of remembering "241, 232, 247."
