XP Themes for Graphic Controls and more...

 

If the application is being developed with XP themes in mind, i.e. it is supposed to use a manifest that radically changes the appearance of the application when it is running in the operating system XP or Vista, then KOL provides the ability to draw graphical elements "to the theme". But by default, to make the code easier, this feature is disabled.

 

Initially, the conditional compilation symbol GRAPHCTL_XPSTYLES was introduced in order for graphical visuals to portray themselves in accordance with current XP themes. As a result, code was added to the final application that was responsible for rendering all the above graphic controls in accordance with the current theme. At the same time, if the user turned off the desktop themes, the drawing was performed with the same algorithm.

 

Later, the effect of the GRAPHCTL_XP_STYLES symbol was significantly extended, thanks to the MTsv DN (this is the developer's alias). Now, when you enable it in the project options, a rather considerable amount of code (about 10 KB) from the visual_xp_styles.inc file is connected to the application, which is responsible for the correct display of ordinary controls, including for the group box - with enabled themes, as well as when switching themes ...

 

But this may not be enough to completely match the appearance. The fact is that as soon as themes are enabled, the appearance of the controls of all applications that support the manifest begins to change dynamically when the mouse cursor moves over them. In order for this behavior to be reflected for graphic controls, you should add one more conditional compilation symbol: GRAPHCTL_HOTTRACK.