One really annoying thing about WinForms is that there's no built in support for transparency for controls. If you want to create a label and want it to blend into any custom background colors this isn't inherently supported. Although there's a static Color.Transparent color property, when you apply to a label on a form it doesn't actually do anything - you get the same default background color (inherited fro the parent) applied instead.

If you're using the text on top of something that is a solid and named color you can usually make this work by looking at the container' BackColor property in code and just inheriting that:

this.lblVersion.BackColor = this.lblVersion.Parent.BackColor;

in code to inherit the background color dynamically.

However that won't work if your background is an image or some sort of gradient or the content overlays more than one single color or control.

For images there's a workaround though: You can use a PictureBox or Image control and make the label a child of that control:

this.lblVersion.Parent = this.SplashImage;

this.lblVersion.BackColor = Color.Transparent;

You can do this in the constructor after InitializeComponent or even in the Form's Load. Note however that using this approach will cause the label's coordinates now to become relative to the Image or PictureBox control, so you effectively lose the ability to lay out the label in the designer in the correctly location - the label will be stuck as form relative rather than a picture box relevant component.

If all else fails you can also create use raw GDI+ code to draw the label onto the form at the specified position form location. As it turns out it's not terribly difficult to do this: Here's a TransparentLabel class that does this. Didn't test this extensively (and the author warns of some possible rendering inconsistencies) but I plugged it into several of my simple scenarios of overlaying a label on top of various graphics this worked just fine.

Seems kind of odd that Microsoft didn't support transparency for controls natively in WinForms especially given that Color.Transparent is actually allowed. I haven't looked at how WinForms renders but it probably uses GDI+ at some point so rendering transparent backgrounds shouldn't exactly be rocket science. I suspect it has something to do related with font smoothing in Windows but who knows <g>.

Anyway - this is nothing new, but it's something I keep running into with the little bit of WinForms development that I do. Hopefully it'll be helpful for a few of you as well.