> On Friday, October 03, 2008 5:31 PM, Jesper Stenlund wrote: > Subiect: GUI-questions > > Hi all > > I have a program that originally was created in -98 with Delphi 3 (on > Windows NT) > Since then we have moved from Delphi 3 to Delphi 5 and now Delphi 2006 > (we > will soon upgrade to D2009) and the OS has been upgraded to XP. > > But the program still looks the same as it did in -98. No > "XP-look-and-feel" at all. > Now we want to upgrade the GUI to look like a real XP-program. > That includes everything from menus to buttons and now I have a couple > of > questions on how to do this. > > 1. How can I get a menu that looks like the one in Microsoft Word or > the > one in Delphi itself? My menu is still grey and rather ugly compared to > Delphi's.
You'll need to use "ActionBars" and "ActionLists" to get the look-and-feel for the menus. Once you add those to your application you'll be able to make them customizable! If you don't want to use Actions you'll need to look into 3rd party components for the look. I myself find the Actions paradigm difficult to use for my applications. To get the look-and-feel I'm using standard menus at design-time and I'm using a smart procedure that turns those standard menus into ActionBars at run-time (so I can avoid 3rd party components). If you only do the usual stuff with menus, you'll find Actions easy to use. I find them difficult to use because most of my applications have at least one dynamic menu (a menu that gets created at run-time based on configuration options). > 2. I have tried the "XP-manifest" component but it seems that certain > components don't repaint themselves in XP-way. > The background colour of the component is still grey instead of the > more > white colour that is on the other components. > The background colour of the components is usually set to clBtnFace. What's not rendered in the expected color? Is it a control (a Button) or is it a panel? If it's a button you'll need to replace it with a button from the Standard or Advanced page (standard TButton or an TBitBtn). If it's a panel that doesn't get the XP Dialog look, I don't know how you can easily fix it. I made a TPanel descendent that has an property to select the kind of XP theaming drawing to apply to it. I can place that panel on any form and give it the XP Dialog look (the whitish background). -- Cosmin Prund _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> [email protected] http://lists.elists.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/delphi
