Windows XP Styles 1

[DrJavaJoe]

Mario Flores, one of PSC February Contest Winners, has a project for implementing XP styles that I think you should check out. Here's the link.

http://www.planetsourcecode.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=51400&lngWId=1

"Two strings walk into a bar. The first string says to the bartender: 'Bartender, I'll have a beer. u.5n$x5t?*&4ru!2[sACC~ErJ'. The second string says: 'Pardon my friend, he isn't NULL terminated'."

 

[strongm]

Question: do you prefer this to the (substantially shorter) XP Manifest solution?

 

[DrJavaJoe]

I've seen a couple advantages to the loooong way. First with the manifest, when option boxes have focus there focus rect are not highlighted, but with Mr Flores' way they do, second it supposedly works pre XP operating systems. I've sort of had a busy day so haven't went through it completely but I did notice that pictureboxes with border style set to 0 are still showing a border.

"Two strings walk into a bar. The first string says to the bartender: 'Bartender, I'll have a beer. u.5n$x5t?*&4ru!2[sACC~ErJ'. The second string says: 'Pardon my friend, he isn't NULL terminated'."

 

[LostInCode]

Must be a similar method to how its done using the CoolXP controls at:

http://home.pages.at/vbmaster/Downloads.html

Here, the option boxes focus rectangles work.

But the source code isn't given out.

 

[strongm]

Yep, I've read some of the problems encountered with manifests, but I'm not sure that all of them are show stoppers.

For example, the one about an option button's focus rect not appearing - well, that's the XP style...

Biggest issue is probably that you have to use the Common Controls 5 libraries to get the XP style applioed to things like the status bar (mainly because version 5 was the last version that actually leveraged the real underlying common controls; for reasons best known to MS version 6 contains it's own implementation of the common controls)

Having said that, maybe it's just me but the Flores solution (essentially rewriting every control that needs the an XP style) seems...um...overkill