Re: Loosing XP style on execustion

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"TBass" <tbj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:50a72c98-8caf-4240-aed0-cc4a0a067c46@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello,

We just upgraded from VS2003 to VS2008 Pro. One thing I noticed is
that, while editing forms in Visual Studio, they have a nice Windows
XP style (rounded buttons and frames, etc). However, once I run the
program (either inside or outside the debugger), that style is lost
and I get the typical Windows 2000 look (except for the window
border).

I'm assuming that there is a style configuration I'm supposed be
turning on or off in a config file, but I haven't seen one. Can anyone
tell me what I'm supposed to do to maintain the style?


We found it necessary to turn off VS2008's default of generating and
embedding a manifest file. The manifest it generates doesn't have a section
to declare that your program should use the v6 common controls (which
enables XP themes). Oddly, while all our (VC++) projects already had a
manifest, and some failed to build due to a duplicate resource, others
compiled and linked but ran without themes. To correct both problems, in
project properties, under Configuration Properties -> Manifest Tool -> Input
and Output, we changed Embed Manifest to No and Output Manifest File to
$(IntDir)\$(ProjectName).manifest. Also note that although you can select
multiple projects + all configurations and seemingly change all at once, we
found that most of the time this did not stick with multiple projects
selected.

Another annoyance we found was that every build (even with no changes)
results in yet another .manifest file getting regenerated, which we also
disabled at Configuration Properties -> Manifest File -> Generate Manifest.

More about our upgrade experience is here:
http://www.kinook.com/blog/?p=49

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.

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