TAB control background in ATL App, XP styles

Question

I have an ATL application with a dialog containing a TAB control. The App uses a common controls manifest.

Under XP with visual styles, the tab control background is a different color than the dialog and the controls (mostly checkboxes), so it looks quite ugly.

Screenshot

How can I fix that?

“Perfect” answer for identical problem here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27085427/common-controls-are-not-properly-painted-when-i-resize-window/58459674#58459674 — Krishty, Oct 19 '19 at 09:17

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 06 '09 at 08:07

There is - apparently - one thing to do to get tab control pages colored correctly using XP visual styles.

In the WM_INITDIALOG handler for each page, call the uxtheme API EnableThemeDialogTexture

With the ETDT_ENABLETAB flag this automatically changes the background color of the dialog and all its child controls to paint appropriately on a tab.

The dialog pages do not need any kind of transparent flag, or indeed any style bit set differently from previously. If you have overridden WM_ERASEBKGND or WM_CTLCOLORDLG in your pages DialogProc you will need to revert to default handling (return FALSE).

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

0

Here you could find answer to your question.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

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answered Jul 15 '09 at 18:32

Kirill V. Lyadvinsky

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 23 '09 at 12:51

The check boxes will post WM_CTLCOLORBTN notifications to their parent. If, for the checkbox control IDs, the parent window's message handler returns the result of

GetStockObject(HOLLOW_BRUSH)

then the check boxes should be drawn with a transparent background, which should give you the look you want.

TAB control background in ATL App, XP styles

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