VCL Styles Utils – New feature

August 6, 2014 by Rodrigo 2 Comments

I just uploaded a new release of the VCL Styles Utils project improving the support for ListViews and TreeView controls. When you uses a TListView setting the CheckBoxes property to True and with the VCL Styles enabled the control will look like so

As you can see the Checkboxes is using the Windows native look and feel, this is because the OS draw these controls directly and not the VCL. Some time ago I show a workaround for this owner-drawing the TListView, unfortunately this implies modify the source code for each TListView in the project which means a lot of work in some scenarios. But now with this new addition to the VCL Styles Utils only adding the VCL.Styles.Hooks unit to your project the checkbox control is properly drawn using the current active VCL Style.

The same improvement goes for the TTreeview controls, by default the opened and closed glyphs are draw using the native look and feel

And now using the VCL.Styles.Hooks unit

Remember which this unit also include a fix for the system colors when the VCL Styles are enabled as is show on this article.

Without Vcl.Styles.Hooks

With Vcl.Styles.Hooks

Note : The VCL.Styles.Hooks unit works hooking the UxTheme dll, this means which using this unit on your project will cause which all the calls to the DrawThemeBackground and DrawThemeBackgroundEx methods with the BP_RADIOBUTTON, BP_CHECKBOX, TVP_GLYPH, TVP_HOTGLYPH parts will be affected.