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CShadeButtonST – A CxShadeButton made using CButtonST

Environment: VC6 SP4, NT4, Win2000, Win9x Abstract These are days where almost everything can be skinned or customized. If you have taken a look at Windows XP you will have noticed that even buttons can have a look far away from what we know. Even if I don’t like hard customizations very much, I’ve noticed […]

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CodeGuru Staff

Jul 11, 2001

2 minute read

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Environment: VC6 SP4, NT4, Win2000, Win9x

Abstract

These are days where almost everything can be skinned or customized. If you have
taken a look at Windows XP you will have noticed that even buttons can have
a look far away from what we know. Even if I don’t like hard customizations very much,
I’ve noticed how much people liked a button control called CxShadeButton
posted by Davide Pizzolato. The idea I have is to make available one or two virtual
functions from CButtonST, the reference control for MFC flat buttons, to
let the developer derive his own class and implement custom background paint still having
all the features from the CButtonST control.

To show this new feature I’ve decided to reproduce the look and feel of
CxShadeButton. I’ve extracted from the original code the class called
CxDib and the code that creates and draws the background effects. All
credits for this code snippets go to Davide Pizzolato.

Virtual functions

CButtonST makes available two virtual functions.

OnDrawBackground

This function is called every time the button background needs to be painted.

If the button is in transparent mode this function will NOT be called.

// Parameters:
//        [IN]    pDC
//                Pointer to a CDC object that indicates the device context.
//        [IN]    pRect
//                Pointer to a CRect object that indicates the bounds of the
//                area to be painted.
//
// Return value:
//        BTNST_OK
//               Function executed successfully.
//
DWORD OnDrawBackground(CDC* pDC, LPCRECT pRect)

OnDrawBorder

This function is called every time the button border needs to be painted.

If the button is in standard (not flat) mode this function will NOT be called.

// Parameters:
//        [IN]    pDC
//                Pointer to a CDC object that indicates the device context.
//        [IN]    pRect
//                Pointer to a CRect object that indicates the bounds of the
//                area to be painted.
//
// Return value:
//        BTNST_OK
//               Function executed successfully.
//
DWORD OnDrawBorder(CDC* pDC, LPCRECT pRect)

The developer derives a class from CButtonST then implements these two functions in the new class.

Example

The CButtonST demo application includes a page that shows how to implement new effects. A class
called CShadeButtonST has been derived from CButtonST and the new effects has been implemented
mainly in the OnDrawBackground method.

Remarks

This architecture makes possible to produce a whole range of buttons not available by default. If someone implements
the look and feel of the new buttons found in Windows XP, I will happy to include his code in the next
CButtonST demo application.