VisualStyleRenderer and Office 2003 colors

All -
(*) Is it possible to get the gradient colors that Office 2003 uses for its
toolbar, programmatically?
For instance Outlook 2003's toolbar under Blue, has a Horizontal Gradient
fill from Argb(220,235, 254) to Argb(129,169,226). Can we get this value
directly using the the Theme APIs?

(*) Does Office compute each of these colors from a base color or does it
directly use the color specified for appropriate theme. If it does compute
these colors, can you please specify the formula applied to the base color.
If it retrieves using Theming APIs, can u pls. specify the partid/state and
the group name?

(*) With .NET 1.1, i tried invain to get these values from uxtheme (using
PInvoke) - but never succeeded. I thought VisualStyleRenderer (2.0) would
allow to get these values easily - but it is turning out to be futile.

(*) How do commercial vendors (SyncFusion / ComponentBar etc) compute the
colors for these toolbar components. Do they hard code the gradient color
values depending on the specific theme?

Googleing shows that couple of people who had asked the same question were
never answered before.
I hope i do get a response for this post.

Regardz
Grafix.

in .NET 2.0 theres a new Color set called ProfessionalColors which gives you
stuff like
ProfessionalColors.ToolstripGradientBegin
ProfessionalColors.ToolstripGradientEnd

hope this helps
Steve.

"Grafix" <Grafix@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:92081D98-B765-4041-A739-BF5BA9F96A11@microsoft.com...
> All -
> (*) Is it possible to get the gradient colors that Office 2003 uses for
> its
> toolbar, programmatically?
> For instance Outlook 2003's toolbar under Blue, has a Horizontal Gradient
> fill from Argb(220,235, 254) to Argb(129,169,226). Can we get this value
> directly using the the Theme APIs?
>
> (*) Does Office compute each of these colors from a base color or does it
> directly use the color specified for appropriate theme. If it does compute
> these colors, can you please specify the formula applied to the base
> color.
> If it retrieves using Theming APIs, can u pls. specify the partid/state
> and
> the group name?
>
> (*) With .NET 1.1, i tried invain to get these values from uxtheme (using
> PInvoke) - but never succeeded. I thought VisualStyleRenderer (2.0) would
> allow to get these values easily - but it is turning out to be futile.
>
> (*) How do commercial vendors (SyncFusion / ComponentBar etc) compute the
> colors for these toolbar components. Do they hard code the gradient color
> values depending on the specific theme?
>
> Googleing shows that couple of people who had asked the same question were
> never answered before.
> I hope i do get a response for this post.
>
> Regardz
> Grafix.
>
>