Developer: RhinoCommon
Summary: The Rhino Application Platform (RAP) provides the tools for .Net developers to wrap their application around Rhino 5.0 by creating custom Skin.

Rhino 5.0 allows developers to customize most of Rhino's interface so that the application appears to be their own. We call this a custom Skin. With a custom Skin, you can change the application icon, splash screen, the application name etc. If you instead are searching for information on how to skin Rhinoceros 4.0 using the unmanaged C++ SDK, see the C++ SDK sample.

Creating a custom Skin for Rhino 5.0 involves creating a custom skin assembly:

• <skin name>.rhs This is a regular .Net .dll that implements the skin's icon, splash screen, application name, etc. In this article, we will refer this to the Skin DLL. See a full list of methods and properties on the Skin class documentation page.

• To create the Skin DLL, launch Visual Studio 2010 and add a project to your solution.
• The Rhino Skin AppWizard will only need to contain one class: the Skin-derived class.

using Rhino.Runtime;
 
namespace MySkin
{
  public class MyHippoSkin : Skin
  {
    protected override string ApplicationName
    {
      get
      {
        return "Hippopotamus";
      }
    }
  }
  // You can override more methods and properties here
}

Imports Rhino.Runtime
 
Namespace MySkin
    Public Class MyHippoSkin
        Inherits Skin
        Protected Overrides ReadOnly Property ApplicationName() As String
            Get
                Return "Hippopotamus"
            End Get
        End Property
    End Class
    ' You can override more methods and properties here
End Namespace

• Compile the Skin DLL.

Warning: modifying the registry wrongly can have negative consequences on your system's stability and even damage the system.

• To install your custom Skin, use REGEDIT.EXE to add a scheme key to your registry with a path to your Skin DLL. For example:

• You can now test your custom Skin by creating shortcut to your Rhino executable with /scheme=”<scheme name from the previous step>” as command line argument. For example:

"C:\Program Files\Rhinoceros 4.0\System\Rhino4.exe" /scheme=MySkin