FastUI.WinForms 1.1.0

FastUI

FastUI is a lightweight, modern UI toolkit for WinForms, designed to bring clean visuals, reusable styling, and structured theming to traditional desktop applications — without external dependencies or designer complexity.

FastUI focuses on productivity, clarity, and consistency, allowing developers to build elegant WinForms tools faster while keeping full control over behavior and rendering.

Key Goals

• Modernize WinForms visuals without abandoning its performance
• Provide reusable, preset-based styling across components
• Keep APIs simple, explicit, and developer-friendly
• Avoid external UI frameworks or heavy dependencies

Core Concepts

1. Custom Rendering Engine

FastUI uses its own lightweight rendering engine to draw:

• Backgrounds
• Borders
• Rounded corners
• Hover / focus / press states

This ensures full visual control and consistent behavior across all components.

Clear & Human-Friendly Properties

FastUI replaces confusing or scattered WinForms properties with clear, readable, and well-organized alternatives.

Examples:

• TextColor instead of ForeColor

• MoveTextHorizontal instead of TextOffsetX

• RowHeight instead of RowTemplate.Height

• TableColor instead of managing:

  • ColumnHeadersDefaultCellStyle.BackColor
  • SelectionBackColor
  • RowsDefaultCellStyle.BackColor
  • BackgroundColor
  • GridColor

All properties are grouped into logical categories, clearly named, and easy to discover in the designer.

2. Smart Input System

FastUI includes a set of smart input controls designed to eliminate repetitive validation logic.

Features include:

• Required field handling
• Auto-validation
• Formatting rules
• Custom masking and input restrictions

This saves development time and avoids rewriting the same validation logic across projects.

Examples:

• Email input with built-in validation

• Date input with strict formats (YYYY-MM-DD)

• Time input with automatic colon insertion (HH:mm)

• Password input with internal policies exposed through simple properties:

  • Forbidden passwords list (string[])
  • Minimum length enforcement
  • Optional complexity mode (upper, lower, digit, symbol)

3. Preset-Based Theming System

FastUI introduces a preset-based theming architecture.

Instead of styling controls individually, themes provide presets that describe how each component should look.

Each theme can define presets for:

• Buttons
• TextBoxes
• ComboBoxes
• Tables

This approach makes styling:

• Consistent
• Reusable
• Easy to extend

Built-in Themes

FastUI ships with several ready-to-use themes:

• Windows11 — clean and native-like
• Google Material — bold colors and rounded surfaces
• Apple — minimal and soft UI
• Mayora — custom design example

Themes can be applied per control or across the entire application.

Example: Applying a Theme

fuiButton1.Theme = "Windows11";
fuiTextBox1.Theme = "GoogleMaterial";
fuiTable1.Theme = "Apple";

Themes are resolved by name using the internal theme registry.

Available Components

Core Components:

• FuiButton — modern button with hover, press, and animation support
• FuiTextBox — custom single-line input with placeholder, caret, and validation rules
• FuiComboBox — styled dropdown with hover and focus behavior
• FuiTable — DataGridView wrapper with modern styling, row effects, and unified alignment
• FuiPanel — panel with rounded corners and custom rendering

Smart Input Components:

• FuiEmail — email validation
• FuiPhoneDz — Algerian phone number validation
• FuiPhoneEgypt — Egyptian phone number validation
• FuiPhoneUSA — US phone number validation
• FuiDate — strict date format (YYYY-MM-DD)
• FuiTime — smart time input (HH:mm)
• FuiCreditCardNumber — strict 16-digit card input
• FuiCreditCardCVV — strict 3-digit CVV
• FuiCreditCardDate — expiry date (MM/YY)
• FuiPassword — advanced password component with policy support

All native WinForms functionality remains accessible.

Extending FastUI

Creating a Custom Theme

To create your own theme, implement the theme interface and provide presets:

public class MyCustomTheme : IFuiTheme
{
    public ButtonPreset GetButtonPreset() => new ButtonPreset { /* values */ };
    public TextBoxPreset GetTextBoxPreset() => new TextBoxPreset { /* values */ };
    public ComboBoxPreset GetComboBoxPreset() => new ComboBoxPreset { /* values */ };
    public TablePreset GetTablePreset() => new TablePreset { /* values */ };
}

Then register it once:

FuiThemeRegistry.Register("MyTheme", new MyCustomTheme());

Your theme will automatically appear in the designer theme list.

Open Source

FastUI is fully open source and free to use.

• No licensing fees
• Can be extended or modified freely
• Designed to be built upon

The codebase is fully documented, and each component includes clear inline documentation to help developers understand behavior quickly.

Philosophy

FastUI does not try to replace WinForms.

It enhances it.

The goal is to keep WinForms:

• Fast
• Explicit
• Predictable

while offering a modern UI experience and a clean architectural foundation.

NuGet Package

FastUI is available on NuGet and can be installed directly into any WinForms project.

Package ID: FastUI.WinForms

Using Package Manager:

Install-Package FastUI.WinForms

Using .NET CLI:

dotnet add package FastUI.WinForms

• No external dependencies
• Works with .NET Framework and modern .NET
• Fully designer-friendly

Framework Support

FastUI.WinForms supports both .NET Framework 4.8 and modern .NET (8.0+), making it suitable for legacy WinForms applications as well as new projects.

License

MIT License

FastUI.WinForms — Write less UI code. Reuse more logic. Build cleaner WinForms apps.