Converting VS 2010 Image Library bitmaps for use with the MS Ribbon Control

Question

I want to use some of these bitmaps on the MS Office Ribbon control, basically like:

ribbon:RibbonButton x:Name="btnCollapsed" SmallImageSource="Images\Collapsed.bmp"

The following is from: VS2010ImageLibrary\Objects\bmp_format\Office and VS_MSObjects_24bitColor_bmp_OfficeVS - Readme.html

"Visual Studio Image Library: Objects (24-Bit, .bmp Format, Office and Visual Studio style)

24-Bit Art This art is 24-bit color. Transparency should be achieved by mapping RGB:255,0,255 to the background color of the UI."

I am trying to use the VS 2010 Image Editor but can't figure out what I need to do. I am guessing I need to save the bmp as PNG but what else? I could manually change the RGB:255,0,255 of each bitmap I need to the pale blue background of the ribbon but I think there should be a simpler technique (e.g., like specifying what the transparent color is)

Any help greatly appreciated.

Hans Passant Hans Passant · Accepted Answer · 2010-11-24T21:42:36

That's Color.Fuchsia. It's a great fuchsed-up color that is very unlikely to ever be used in a bitmap. Very commonly used in old C/C++ user interface code to make 24-bpp bitmaps, a format that doesn't support transparency, into bitmaps that behave like they do. I'll spare you the C code that's required to make that work, it's quite fuchsed-up.

A lot of the bitmaps that are in the image library came from internal Microsoft projects that used this trick. Big chunks of Windows are still native C++ code that uses the raw Win32 api, GDI doesn't support transparency at all so 24-bpp was common.

You'd need a decent graphics editor, the first order of business is to turn it into a 32-bpp bitmap. Then color-replace. I'd personally use a quicky .NET program that uses Bitmap.MakeTransparent(), draw to a 32-bpp bitmap and save that as a .png

Converting VS 2010 Image Library bitmaps for use with the MS Ribbon Control

2 Answers