Question

I created a simple stick man in a Windows Form User-Control (consisting of a radio button and three labels and one progress bar).

I set the back-color of the new user-control to transparent so that when I drag it onto my form, it blends with other colors and drawings on the form.
I am not getting what I’m trying to achieve.

Here is the picture:

Answer 1

UserControl already supports this, its ControlStyles.SupportsTransparentBackColor style flag is already turned on. All you have to do is set the BackColor property to Color.Transparent.

Next thing you have to keep in mind in that this transparency is simulated, it is done by asking the Parent of the control to draw itself to produce the background. So what is important is that you get the Parent set correctly. That’s a bit tricky to do if the parent is not a container control. Like a PictureBox. The designer will make the Form the parent so you will see the form’s background, not the picture box. You’ll need to fix that in code, edit the form constructor and make it look similar to this:

var pos = this.PointToScreen(userControl11.Location);
userControl11.Parent = pictureBox1;
userControl11.Location = pictureBox1.PointToClient(pos);