Custom Shell and Themed Controls

[Ben Madsen]

I've been spending a few hours on this and I haven't found anything
helpful. I'm trying to use a custom shell (our in-house VS.NET C#
application) yet still have the XP Luna theme apply to the controls. As it
stands now, the controls look good on the development machine (XP Pro w/
Explorer Shell) but they look like the old 2k style controls on the XP
Embedded build. Any ideas on how to trigger Theme loading when using a
custom shell?

Thanks,
Ben Madsen

 

[Andy Allred [MS]]

Well, this will be an experiment since I'm not sure Luna was developed with
the potential that Explorer shell wouldn't be present. So verify or add the
following components:
- Class Install Library - Desk
- Display Control Panel
- Windows XP Visual Style

Let me know how it goes. Also, check Google Groups on this NG's archive to
see if this has been tried before.

Good luck.

Andy

 

[Ben Madsen]

Checked the newsgroup and nothing was there. The build already has those
three components, so I'm guessing that the Luna theme wasn't developed in a
manner that allows me to do this. Oh well, I guess since I'm only looking
for a couple of controls to be themed I might be able to do it myself.

One thing I did notice is that there are dll calls to hook into
"uxtheme.lib" and get the backgrounds myself. Is there some documentation
on using this method? All I've seen is some source code that did it and I
can't seem to make much sense of it right now.

Thanks,
-Ben

 

[Jason]

I do not know if this applies but our stand-alone application had the same
behaviour until we found out about XP 'manifests'. It is an XML file
specifying the look and feel of the application that goes in the RC file or
in an external file.

Jason