Material3.WinForms 0.3.0

Material3.WinForms

Material 3 (Material You) for Windows Forms — design tokens and owner-drawn controls with dynamic color from a seed, light/dark themes with runtime switching, the full M3 type scale, elevation, state layers and motion tokens.

Existing "Material for WinForms" libraries implement Material 2 and are largely unmaintained. This project targets the current spec: HCT tonal palettes, color roles, surface containers and the 2023+ component look.

Status: preview (0.3). Foundation and the core component catalog are complete.

Features

• Dynamic color — full light + dark ColorScheme generated from one seed color through a C# port of the HCT/CAM16 pipeline (no native dependencies). Three variants: TonalSpot (M3 default), Neutral (near-monochrome), Vibrant.
• Runtime theme switching — ThemeManager.IsDark = false repaints every subscribed control; no restart, no per-control wiring.
• Color roles — all M3 roles including the six surface containers, inverse roles, outline pair, plus shared Success/Warning extensions.
• Type scale — all 15 styles (Display → Label) on Segoe UI with letter-spacing and line-height metadata GDI fonts can't carry.
• Elevation 0–5 — painted soft shadows (WinForms has no compositor) + per-level surface tint.
• State layers — spec opacities for hover / focus / pressed / dragged, used consistently by every control.
• Motion tokens — M3 duration scale and cubic-bezier easings (standard + emphasized) evaluated exactly like CSS timing functions.
• Material Symbols — 30+ icons embedded as SVG, rasterized with caching and tinted to any role color.

Controls

Quickstart

using Material3.WinForms.Theming;

[STAThread]
static void Main() {
    Application.EnableVisualStyles();

    // One line of theming: every Material control follows this scheme.
    ThemeManager.Apply(MaterialTheme.FromSeed(Color.FromArgb(0x67, 0x50, 0xA4)), isDark: true);

    Application.Run(new MainForm());
}

// Switch mode at runtime — all controls repaint themselves.
ThemeManager.IsDark = !ThemeManager.IsDark;

// Or swap the whole palette.
ThemeManager.Theme = MaterialTheme.FromSeed(Color.SeaGreen, SchemeVariant.Vibrant);

var save = new MaterialButton {
    Text = "Save",
    Variant = MaterialButtonVariant.Filled,
    IconGlyph = MaterialIcons.Check,
};

Custom drawing uses the same tokens the stock controls do:

using Material3.WinForms.Theming;   // MaterialColors — current scheme roles
using Material3.WinForms.Tokens;    // Shape, Spacing, StateLayers, Motion, Elevation
using Material3.WinForms.Typography; // MaterialType — the 15-style type scale

Gallery

samples/Material3.Gallery is a live component catalog: every color role, the full type scale, elevation levels, all button variants and every control in both modes. Run it to smoke-test changes or to grab screenshots.

dotnet build Material3.WinForms.sln
samples\Material3.Gallery\bin\Debug\net472\Material3.Gallery.exe

High-DPI

The controls scale their owner-drawn geometry to the monitor DPI (via Control.DeviceDpi), so they stay crisp at 125/150/200%. DPI awareness is a process-level setting that the host application must opt into — a referenced DLL cannot set it. In your app:

• declare awareness in your app.manifest (<dpiAware>true</dpiAware>), and on .NET Framework also add an app.config <System.Windows.Forms.ApplicationConfigurationSection> with <add key="DpiAwareness" value="System" /> — the manifest alone makes the process aware but does not enable WinForms' Control.DeviceDpi, so without this section the controls can't scale (on .NET 8 use Application.SetHighDpiMode(...) instead), and
• set AutoScaleMode = AutoScaleMode.Dpi on your forms.

That's all — the Material controls then render crisply with no extra code. See samples/Material3.Gallery/app.manifest and App.config for a working example. If you do your own owner-drawing with the shared tokens, Material3.WinForms.Dpi.Scale(control, px) is the same helper the controls use.

Requirements

• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ or .NET 8 (net8.0-windows)
• Windows 10+ recommended (DWM caption theming and rounded corners degrade gracefully on older builds)

Acknowledgements

The HCT color pipeline is a C# port of Google's material-color-utilities (Apache 2.0). Icons are Material Symbols (Apache 2.0).

License

MIT © dary1337