My Win32 Application displays Menus as shown when running on Win 7:
This is the Default for the themes Windows 7 as well as Windows 7 Aqua.
Please note that the selected menu entry is only slightly different from the other entries. I think it is much too less highlighted and therefore i am looking for a way to give the selected entry a different color. But unfortunately all possibilities to modify menu colors disappeared in Windows 7. The settings made in the window color dialog are non effective for menus.
But amazingly Microsoft's own applications look different. I.e. Paint has different color and appearance of menus:
This has good contrast and is much better than the default for a Win32 application.
Also Visual Studio 2010 looks different:
I know that VS 2010 is build on WPF. I don't know if and how the ribbon, used in paint influences the menu appearance. My menus are set up dynamically using SetMenu();
My Question: Is there any way to change the appearance of my applications menu using a API or maybe a manifest or resource?
Or is there a way to modify the color of the selected menu entry in Windows 7 through settings?
You can make your own user drawn menus. For an example, take a look at this CodeProject.com article: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/menus/newmenuxpstyle.aspx
Also, VS 2010 is not entirely built on WPF - only the code editor.
Related
I am building a visual studio application and have designed it using visual studio windows form. I am using the siticone library for the GUI but when i lay widgets out on the designer and then run the application all the widgets move. The buttons do not but the labs on them do. Also i have added a user control page that moves aswell. Please Help.
Cheers.enter image description here
Make sure that your Winform Font style and size match with all child controls including all Siticone controls.
Verify that you have anchored your controls accordingly on your form or panel control.
I need to create a shoebox-style native Windows app in C++. A good example of such a UI would be CleanMyPC:
I've tried the various options of the MFC App wizard in Visual Studio 2019 to see what that would give, but it's either document-based (SDI), or too limited (dialog-style). The closest was an empty Win32 app, which just displays a menu bar and a blank window beneath it. At least it matches the Windows style. But that would mean using bare Win32 API, which doesn't seem like a good idea.
Can a UI like in the screenshot be created with MFC? If so, would that be a reasonable approach? Can MFC be effectively used in a non-document-style, non-dialog-style UI like this?
I understand that there's heavy customization of the controls going on in the screenshot; the question is can it be done with MFC?
It looks like the left sidebar and the right details areas could be made of customized list controls. I'll be looking into how a dialog-based sample app arranges the window, so that no document stuff is involved, but without immediate termination on a button click.
Previously I used to piddle around with VB6 to develop a couple of personal projects. Following my upgrade to Windows 7, I've decided to piddle about with vb.net Express Edition 2010.
If I wanted my VB6 application to blend in with the visual style of Windows, I would use the code and techniques described here. In short, I would use a Manifest file and a couple of calls within the application and most of the elements would look similar to the XP theme applied. If it was run on 2000, 95 or 98 then it would look like a standard Windows app. All was good.
Now I've moved onto vb.net, I've written a simple "Hello, world" application but I have absolutely no idea on how to make it look like the Windows 7 theme (eg. the font matches the system font and the widgets are styled correctly).
Just changing the font is a hack and will look out of place on machines that are set-up differently or run a different version of Windows where the default font is different.
How do I ensure my application matches the applied Windows theme irrespective of the version of Windows?
A lot of this is automatic if you create a Windows Forms app. They will (mostly) use the standard native Windows controls which draw themselves with the theme colors. But there are exceptions:
the Form item template uses a default Font named Microsoft Sans Serif. You'll have to change it to Segoe UI to match the Vista/Win7 default. This is only necessary for the Form class, all controls you put on it will automatically inherit that font. On an XP machine, the Windows font mapper will notice that the font is missing and automatically fall back to MSS.
the MenuStrip class uses custom rendering to draw the menu items. It tries to match the Windows style when you change the RenderMode property to System but the way it draws doesn't match the Win7 style. Right-click the toolbox, Choose Items and select MainMenu. That's a legacy version that does use Windows to draw menus so it produces the proper theme appearance.
A very similar problem for ToolStrip. It's legacy version is ToolBar. This is a hard one to swallow, it doesn't use a rebar which make the tool bar look flat and ugly.
There are similar problems in WPF but with the added problem that WPF doesn't use any of the standard Windows controls. And gets it wrong in subtle places.
e.g. set the application appearance to classic, but set the window appearance to Aero style.
Is there a way to do this?
If you are using WPF or Silverlight you can use Themes. This page on the MSDN goes into some detail.
WPF Themes on CodePlex has examples.
This article on Code Project has some more information.
You'd actually want just one unchangeable theme and that would be the Windows Classic one.
In Vista and Windows 7 almost any time the system uses a standard Listview (ie: Explorer Windows) it's accompanied by a little split button that shows a slider when the split is clicked that allows you to switch between the different views available for that listview (Tile, Details, List, etc.) as well as sliding smoothly between icon sizes (from 32x32 is to 256x256) using the top half of the slider.
This is a cool little bit of functionality, so I was wondering: Is that control available to developers, and if so what is it called and where is it documented? (Win32/C++ preferred)
Turns out in Windows 7, the explorer window is no longer a standard listview (though it does an extremely good job of looking like one). Open Spy++, point it at an explorer window list pane, and you'll see a classname of "DirectUIHWND" instead of the old "SysListView32".
The actual slider itself is indeed a real ComCtl32 slider; so you could perhaps roll your own; but as far as I know there's no way to reuse the existing explorer pane's functionality.