Themes Fixed in .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2

Heath Stewart

April 19th, 20050 0

Surely by now you’ve seen the news on the Blogs.msdn.com homepage that both .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 (both also known as “Whidbey Beta 2”) have been released, so I won’t mention it. 😉

I do want to share, however, after having written an article a long time ago entitled Windows XP Visual Styles for Windows Forms¹, that themes have been fixed for both TabPage and GroupBox classes. Previously, the container portion of a TabPage did not “inherit” the theme applied to the TabPage, and a GroupBox within a TabPage lead to its child controls not being drawn using theme data. Many people went to a lot of work to P/Invoke the Theme APIs to fix this, and complicated scenarios often arose.

The bug that required a call to Application.DoEvents() has also been fixed so that you can simply call Application.EnableVisualStyles() and Application.Run() in succession.

¹Please note that the original article was written and published before 1.1 was released, so the technique may be obsolete but still presents an alternative to supporting Themes for pre-1.1 installations.