Skinning WinAPI Controls

Posted by Brad on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Brad
Published on 2010-12-27T08:25:47Z Indexed on 2010/12/27 8:53 UTC
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c++

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winapi

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gui

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skinning

If you've ever seen an application in the Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5), you may have noticed that it doesn't look like the native Windows GUI.. They have modified it to have a different look to it.

Where would someone begin to make an application that has a custom skin? CS5 uses the Adobe Source library for it's widget/control management, so I tried downloading and compiling the Adobe Source Library to see if I could make a nice skinned app like Photoshop CS5, but after finally getting it to compile and tested it, I realized the library was only for managing widgets and not skinning the GUI, like CS5 has.

Where would I begin to make a nice skinned program like Adobe Cs5 applications? Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Do I simply use the WM_PAINT Message from WinAPI and render my own widgets using openGL or something?

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