CrystalLabel: Transparent Label for Forms

One question I often see getting asked on forums is how to make a label transparent on Windows Forms. Since I already had CrystalGradientControl working with the TransparentMode property (setting to true makes the background transparent), I decided to make the CrystalLabel control. As with CrystalTrackBar, you can use this with a gradient background (when TransparentMode is false) also.

The base class does most of the work, all I had to do was to override OnPaint and draw the text:

protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs pe)
{
    // Paint text
    Rectangle rc = new Rectangle(0,0,this.Width,this.Height);
    TextRenderer.DrawText(pe.Graphics,this.Text,this.Font,
        rc, this.ForeColor, Color.Transparent);

    // Calling the base class OnPaint
    base.OnPaint(pe);
}

The control must resize the rectangle with the text changes by overriding OnTextChanged (and OnFontChanged as well):

protected override void OnTextChanged(EventArgs e)
{
    this.Size = TextRenderer.MeasureText(this.Text,this.Font);
    RedrawControl();
    base.OnTextChanged(e);
}

I'm not sure how far I'm going to proceed with Transparent controls. I implemented CrystalTrackBar for a specific application and CrystalLabel was very quick to implement. I would be curious to know which controls would be a good candidate for transparent or gradient properties.

You can download CrystalLabel (and the Crystal Toolkit) in the Downloads section. It comes with full source code and demo programs.