Material 3 for .NET

Material 3 (Material You) for .NET desktop — WinForms & WPF. Dynamic color from a single seed, runtime light/dark switching, the full M3 type scale, elevation, state layers and motion. One shared HCT engine (Material3.Core), two UI stacks. No native dependencies.

_{Drag the seed hue — the entire palette recolors live through the HCT pipeline.}

Existing "Material for WinForms" libraries implement Material 2 and are largely unmaintained. This project targets the current spec: HCT tonal palettes, color roles, surface containers and the 2023+ component look.

Status (0.7): WinForms — foundation, component catalog and designer support complete. WPF — the shared HCT engine, live dynamic-color theming, M3Icon, motion helpers, and a core set of M3 controls (filled/tonal/outlined/text buttons, text field, chips, menus, tooltip, scrollbar, progress, card, expander) all ship and work; the control suite is still growing toward WinForms parity (selection, navigation and overlay components come next).

Packages

One HCT engine, three packages — a shared Core plus two UI stacks:

Package	Target	Status
Material3.Core	netstandard2.0	HCT/CAM16 engine, tonal palettes, color roles, MaterialTheme — platform-neutral Argb, no UI deps
Material3.WinForms	net472 / net8.0-windows	Full M3 control catalog + Visual Studio designer support — preview, usable
Material3.Wpf	net472 / net8.0-windows	Dynamic-color M3Theme (live DynamicResource brushes from one seed), M3Icon, motion helpers, plus a core M3 control set (see coverage) — usable; growing toward WinForms parity

Two demo galleries are published with each release: Material3.WinForms.Gallery (WinForms) and Material3.Wpf.Gallery (WPF).

Documentation

• Material3.WinForms → — controls, quickstart, designer support, high-DPI.
• Material3.Wpf → — dynamic-color theming, controls, WPF ↔ WinForms coverage.
• Material3.Core — the platform-neutral HCT engine (Argb, netstandard2.0).

Screenshots

The same gallery pages in light and dark — every control follows the active scheme. Rows: color roles · buttons & FAB · selection · cards & lists · overlays & pickers.

Light	Dark

_{Screenshots and demos captured on v0.5.}

Requirements

• .NET Framework 4.7.2+ or .NET 8 (net8.0-windows)
• Windows 10+ recommended (DWM caption theming and rounded corners degrade gracefully on older builds)

Building

dotnet build Material3.sln -c Release
dotnet test Material3.sln -c Release

Acknowledgements

The HCT color pipeline is a C# port of Google's material-color-utilities (Apache 2.0). Icons are Material Symbols (Apache 2.0).

License

MIT © dary1337