VCL Styles for Inno Setup

December 11, 2013 by Rodrigo 49 Comments

Introduction

As part of the VCL Styles Utils project, I made a plugin (dll) to skin the installers created by Inno setup. The current size of the plugin is about 1.6 mb, but when is included (and compressed) in the script only add ~490 Kb to the final installer.

How to use it

In order to use the plugin you must follow these steps

1. Add the VclStylesinno.dll file to your inno setup script and the VCL Style file to use.
2. Import the function LoadVCLStyleW for Unicode versions of Inno setup or the LoadVCLStyleA method for the Ansi version
3. Import the function UnLoadVCLStyles
4. In the InitializeSetup function extract the style to use and call the LoadVCLStyle method passing the name of the style file
5. Finally in the DeinitializeSetup function call the UnLoadVCLStyles method.

Check the next sample script

[Files]
Source: ..\VclStylesinno.dll; DestDir: {app}; Flags: dontcopy
Source: ..\Styles\Amakrits.vsf; DestDir: {app}; Flags: dontcopy

[Code]
// Import the LoadVCLStyle function from VclStylesInno.DLL
procedure LoadVCLStyle(VClStyleFile: String); external 'LoadVCLStyleW@files:VclStylesInno.dll stdcall';
// Import the UnLoadVCLStyles function from VclStylesInno.DLL
procedure UnLoadVCLStyles; external 'UnLoadVCLStyles@files:VclStylesInno.dll stdcall';

function InitializeSetup(): Boolean;
begin
  ExtractTemporaryFile('Amakrits.vsf');
  LoadVCLStyle(ExpandConstant('{tmp}\Amakrits.vsf'));
  Result := True;
end;

procedure DeinitializeSetup();
begin
  UnLoadVCLStyles;
end;

TODO

• Add support for TFolderTreeView and TStartMenuFolderTreeView components
• Add support for themed controls in the TNewCheckBoxList component
• Add support for the npbstMarquee style in the TNewProgressBar component

Source code and Installer

The source code and installer is available on Github.

As always all your comments and feedback is welcome.