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Drawing windows BUTTONs on coloured backgrounds
Date: 4/7/2016
Tags: windows
The default windows BUTTON drawing behaviour draws a 1px grey border around buttons. If you place the button on a parent window that is a different colour you get an ugly border like this:



So I decided to see what I could do about that. It turns out that there is no "setting" that can fix that. You either draw the whole control yourself or let the system draw it. Now I want the system look without the wrong coloured border. So I reimplemented the WM_PAINT like so:
case WM_PAINT:
{
    if (!GetCss())
        break;

    // This is the effective background of the parent window:
    GCss::ColorDef bk = GetCss()->NoPaintColor();

    // If it's not the default...
    if (!bk.IsValid())
        break;

    // Then create a screen device context for painting
    GScreenDC dc(this);
    
    // Get the control to draw itself into a bitmap
    GRect c = GetPos();
    
    // Create a HBITMAP in the same size as the control 
    // and the same bit depth as the screen
    GMemDC m(c.X(), c.Y(), GdcD->GetColourSpace());
    // Create a HDC for the bitmap
    HDC hdc = m.StartDC();					
    // Ask the control to draw itself into the memory bitmap
    SendMessage(_View, WM_PRINT, (WPARAM)hdc, PRF_ERASEBKGND|PRF_CLIENT);
    // End the HDC
    m.EndDC();

    // Draw correct background
    m.Colour(bk.Rgb32, 32);
    // The outside 1px border (unfilled rect)
    m.Box(0, 0, c.X()-1, c.Y()-1);
    // The 4 pixels at the corners
    m.Set(1, 1);
    m.Set(c.X()-2, 1);
    m.Set(1, c.Y()-2);
    m.Set(c.X()-2, c.Y()-2);

    // Now stick it on the screen
    dc.Blt(0, 0, &m);

    // Skip over calling the parent class' callback procedure.
    return true;
    break;
}
What it does is get the system to draw the button into a memory bitmap and then "fix" the border, before blting the whole thing to the screen. Now it's implemented with LGI types and classes, but the whole idea is fairly straight forward that you could implement in raw Win32 API calls. This fixes the border and still looks native:



The key is re-purposing the WM_PRINT message to get a copy of the control's native look. For the moment I've limited this to just when running on Windows 7, because I think Windows 8 and 10 use flat colour controls and [possibly] don't need fixing like this.
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It's been a fantastic week at Memecode headquarters...
Date: 12/6/2015
Tags: windows
I bought a cheap new Win8.1 tablet. Which was amazing for about 24 hours until I decided that I didn't want the 5gb restore partition and tried to remove it and resize the C: to fill the available space. Yeah that didn't go so well and I think I've bricked it.
  • Said restore partition doesn't have any trouble shooting or repair tools (I did copy it to USB first).
  • I found the BIOS but it won't read an external OS on USB if I set that to the first boot device.
  • The partitioning software crashes at boot on the main C: partition install of Windows.


To add insult to injury my main Windows 7 install on the desktop PC died tonight. It boots to a blank black screen. Safe mode hangs with lots of disk activity. It got stuck on the Paragon HFS+ driver, so I booted into Mac and removed that (copied elsewhere). And I'm trying to fix the disks one at a time with Disk Manager. Currently it's in some sort of infinite loop verifying my Win7 NTFS partition. Sigh.

Seems like all my PCs hate me at the moment.

One thing to be happy about is the fixes to HTML table layout I implemented today. There were some bugs related to table layout for spanned cells that have non-dynamic width specifications that are larger than the available space. And also an off by one error in the block element flow code. Slowly that HTML control is getting quite solid.
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