Cool Controls Add-In

Although the Developer Studio has a nice user interface, it still can be improved in many different ways. Here is an example of such improvement. The main goal for this project was to get a new look and feel for the dialog and toolbar controls, similar to this which can be found in Corel 8.0. Generally speaking the effect has been achieved by subclassing a control and painting on the non-client area (in most cases) when the control requires redrawing. The state of the control depends on the keyboard focus and mouse cursor position. The control is drawn with lighter borders (not totally flat) when it has no focus or mouse is not over the window. Otherwise, the control is drawn in a normal way (without any changes).

Currently supported controls are:

• Pushbuttons (except those with BS_OWNERDRAW style)
• Checkboxes
• Radiobuttons
• Scrollbar controls
• Edit boxes
• List boxes
• List views
• Tree views
• Spin buttons
• Slider controls
• Date/time pickers
• Combo boxes (all styles)
• Header controls
• Hotkey controls
• IPAddress controls
• Toolbars (without TBSTYLE_FLAT)
• Month calendars
• Extended combo boxes
• Rich edit controls

You can install this add-in just as usual. Put "CoolCtrlsAddIn.dll" in any folder (the best place is "AddIns" subfolder in your DevStudio installation tree), choose "Customize" from the "Tools" menu, select the "Add-ins and Macro files" tab, click on the "Browse" button and select file "CoolCtrlsAddIn.dll". After installing reboot the DevStudio so changes will take an effect. To stop using the add-in repeat previous steps and clear appropriate checkbox. Rebooting DevStudio again is necessary. This component has been tested using VC 5.0 and VC 6.0 on Windows NT 4.0 as well as on Windows 98 and it's worked fine.

Download add-in - 19 KB