Enabling Visual Styles - Make it pretty!

Hello there

A lot of people ask me why in C++ the windows they create look that ugly while in C# or other .NET languages they look very nice. To illustrate what i mean look at the following images:
C++:


C#


The reason why this happens lies inside the manifest (or more exactly the application context). A .NET application automatically generates an application context that loads the Version 6 of the Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls assembly instead of the default one which is Version 5. While Version 5 renders the common controls without any visual styles Version 6 uses the appropriate styles since Windows XP.

To achieve that you need to add a dependency inside the manifest and you need to ship it with your executable. Thats how the source code looks in my example application which is the way i prefer to ship the manifest with my application.

#include <windows.h>
#include "resource.h"

#pragma comment(linker, "/manifestdependency:\"type='win32' name='Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls' version='6.0.0.0' processorArchitecture='*' publicKeyToken='6595b64144ccf1df' language='*'\"")

BOOL WINAPI DialogProc(HWND hWindow, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
 switch(uMsg)
 {
 case WM_CLOSE:
  EndDialog(hWindow, 0);
  DestroyWindow(hWindow);
  return TRUE;
 case WM_INITDIALOG:
  return TRUE;
 }

 return FALSE;
}

int main()
{
 DialogBox(GetModuleHandle(NULL), MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDD_DIALOG1), GetDesktopWindow(), DialogProc);
}

IDD_DIALOG1 is the numerical constant of a dialog resource embedded inside my executable.

Thanks for reading and im looking forward reading your comments!
Yanick