How to change the mouse cursor into a custom one when working with Windows Forms applications?

Question

In a UserControl I want to change the mouse cursor from the arrow, to a hand icon.
What I currently do is this:

this.Cursor = Cursors.Hand; 

This is very nice, it gives me a mouse cursor looking like this:

But here comes my problem... this shows a hand with a pointing finger.
What I need is a "grabbing" hand, more like this one:

How do I do this?, How can I load an icon file (.ico), a cursor file (.cur), or image file (.png), and use it as the mouse cursor?

Answer 1

If you have a cursor file:

Cursor myCursor = new Cursor("myCursor.cur"); myControl.Cursor = myCursor; 

otherwise you have to create one:

some more information about custom cursors

Answer 2

A caveat to using custom cursors with the WinForms Cursor class is that when using the stream, filename, and resource constructor overloads the supplied .cur file must be black and white in color.

Meaning that this will not work if the .cur files contains any colors besides black and white.

Cursor myCursor = new Cursor("myCursor.cur"); myControl.Cursor = myCursor; 

There is a way around this limitation by using the Windows handle constructor overload:

Create the handle by using the Windows API:

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")] public static extern IntPtr LoadCursorFromFile(string fileName); 

Then pass it to the appropriate Cursor constructor like this:

IntPtr handle = LoadCursorFromFile("myCursor.cur"); Cursor myCursor = new Cursor(handle); myControl.Cursor = myCursor; 

I hope this prevents others from scratching their heads to an ArgumentException being thrown stating: Image format is not valid. The image file may be corrupted. when using the other Cursor constructor overloads with a .cur file that contains color.