Comments on: Themed menu’s icons, a complete Vista and XP solution

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 13:46:40 +0000

Carlos: Indeed hbmp(Un)checked makes all icons to be inverted when item is focused, this is the way it works, probably due it was designed to handle monochrome bitmaps in most circumstances. Dieter: Are you sure they are not present in the system? AFAIK GdiPlus is shipped with all Windows begging with XP, please have a look coz newer systems may not have GdiPlus.dll inside of system32 folder directly but inside WinSxS, i.e.: C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\amd64_Microsoft.Windows.GdiPlus_6595b64144ccf1df_1.0.3790.3959_x-ww_B45BA3BE\GdiPlus.dll C:\WINDOWS\WinSxS\x86_Microsoft.Windows.GdiPlus_6595b64144ccf1df_1.0.3790.3959_x-ww_8251BDDE\GdiPlus.dll Having them in WinSxS requires proper manifest inside your application to load. Anders: If you have read the article more carefully you'd see that the problem is actually ownerdraw method that requires much more code and attention, also it makes keyboards shortcuts stop working. Moreover "themed" is just a term, you say XP menus are not themed, but they may be flat or not. But isn't this flatness a part of XP theming functionality? How do you tell menu is flat or now w/o using uxtheme API?

By: Anders

Anders — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:49:28 +0000

XP does not have themed menus (Other than start-menu .. all programs, but that is not a menu, its a toolbar (yes, really)) The only thing you need to do to get 100% correct icons on XP is to check to see if flat menus are on, if they are, the selection rectangle needs a border with COLOR_HIGHLIGHT and fill it with COLOR_MENUHILIGHT

By: Dieter Lunn

Dieter Lunn — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:50:54 +0000

I am using Vista Home Premium 64bit and there is no gdiplus installed by default afaik. Are you sure that this is the easiest method available? I don’t really like to install PSDK just so use TortoiseSVN and I am sure more other users aren’t going to like it much either.

By: Carlos Alloatti

Carlos Alloatti — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:56:30 +0000

Very well explained, thank you. Just one question, when using the hbmp(Un)checked method, the icons get color-inverted when highlighted? because that is what I get.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:06:59 +0000

Adam, thank you for wonderful post. I tried to implement owner-draw method today, but there are too much problems. WM_MENUCHAR doesn’t work at all. As far as I understand, shell interpret this message itself and doesn’t pass it to HandleMenuMsg2. (This article - http://www.codeproject.com/shell/ShellExtGuide7.asp - confirms that only WM_MEASUREITEM and WM_DRAWITEM are passed to HandleMenuMsg / HandleMenuMsg2.) So you must not use owner-draw menu items in context menu if you want keyboard accelerators.

When using owner-draw method, there is also a minor problem with positioning the icon on Win98. And, as you said, a lot of code need to be written (I wrote 83 lines by now, and it’s still not perfect).

So, I’m thinking of swithing to hbmp(un)checked method. Could you please tell how does it look on Vista? If you have a screenshot, please post it. Thank you in advance.