XP-theme style UI - BinarySmartButton .NET control presents its UI with the XP theme style look. This control delivers the XP theme rendering even when run on non-XP Windows platforms, straight out-of-the-box. BinarySmartButton .NET can display any of the 3 possible themes, irrespective of the currently active theme that is set in the Operating system. For example, even if the current active XP theme is set to Blue, you can choose to display the BinarySmartButton control emulating either Olive green or Silver theme. Note that, using the standard .NET Framework Button control, XP theme rendering is not possible in Windows 2000 and other non-XP windows platforms.

Support for displaying images / icon along with their Alpha-channel information - BinarySmartButton .NET can display images / icons along with XP theme emulation.  The standard .NET button control does not support displaying images when it is set with its FlatStyle property as "System" and used with manifest files/Visual styles enabled. Even when using manifest files in Windows XP with the standard .NET button control, you can only use the active XP theme. With BinarySmartButton .NET, you can choose to have the button control display any of the three possible themes, irrespective of the currently active theme that is set in the Operating system. The control can display images/icons without losing the icon's alpha-channel information.

Menu Button style - BinarySmartButton .NET control supports a special "MenuButton" style. When set with this style, you can assign a set of MenuItems to the control, and the control will automatically display a drop-down menu just below the control so as to let your users choose a command from a list of numerous possible commands. This feature extends the button control's functionality by making a variety of commands to choose from and execute, instead of the traditional "one command" button functionailty. The control ships with our BinaryMenuItem .NET component so you could choose to use this control to enable Visual Studio / XP style menu rendering, for use in the control's menu button style. This control also lets developers use the ContextMenuStrip component (newly introduced in .NET 2.0 framework) as an optional menu component, for use in the control's menu button style. When used with BinaryMenuItem .NET, the control provides out-of-the-box support for customising the context menu item's drawing, as per your requirements.

Rich designer support and IButtonControl interface implementation - The control comes with rich design-time support, making it absolutely easy to work with it. The design-time features supports full "in-place" editing. Almost everything that you can do with the control at run-time, can be done in the design-time in VS .NET/VS 2005 IDE. This includes ability to :

• Setting up context menu
• Setting up default/gradient painting for rendering context menu (when used with BinaryMenuItem .NET)
• Enabling glass rendering of menu item selection aspect (when used with BinaryMenuItem .NET)
• Customise context menu's other rendering aspects (when used with BinaryMenuItem .NET)
• Customise menu button separator(optional) length and color
• Customise menu button drop-down arrow color
• Drawing focus rectangle when the button is in focus
• Customise font, colors, and other UI rendering aspects of the button

All the above, without ever having to leave your Visual Studio Form design surface. BinarySmartButton .NET control implements IButtonControl interface, thereby allowing it to be used as Accept / Cancel button in a Windows Form.