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Although the Developer Studio has a nice user interface, it still can be improved in
many different ways. Here is an example of such improvement. The main goal for this
project was to get a new look and feel for the dialog and toolbar controls, similar to
this which can be found in Corel 8.0. Generally speaking the effect has been achieved by
subclassing a control and painting on the non-client area (in most cases) when the control
requires redrawing. The state of the control depends on the keyboard focus and mouse
cursor position. The control is drawn with lighter borders (not totally flat) when it has
no focus or mouse is not over the window. Otherwise, the control is drawn in a normal way
(without any changes).
Currently supported controls are:
- Pushbuttons (except those with BS_OWNERDRAW style)
- Checkboxes
- Radiobuttons
- Scrollbar controls
- Edit boxes
- List boxes
- List views
- Tree views
- Spin buttons
- Slider controls
- Date/time pickers
- Combo boxes (all styles)
- Header controls
- Hotkey controls
- IPAddress controls
- Toolbars (without TBSTYLE_FLAT)
- Month calendars
- Extended combo boxes
- Rich edit controls
You can install this add-in just as usual. Put “CoolCtrlsAddIn.dll” in any
folder (the best place is “AddIns” subfolder in your DevStudio installation
tree), choose “Customize” from the “Tools” menu, select the
“Add-ins and Macro files” tab, click on the “Browse” button and select
file “CoolCtrlsAddIn.dll”. After installing reboot the DevStudio so changes will
take an effect. To stop using the add-in repeat previous steps and clear appropriate
checkbox. Rebooting DevStudio again is necessary. This component has been tested
using VC 5.0 and VC 6.0 on Windows NT 4.0 as well as on Windows 98 and it’s worked fine.
