Visual Studio 2013 GUI replication in winapi

Question

I am writing a GUI program using C ++ and Winapi, and I want my window to have a user border. Visual Studio 2013 on Windows Desktop does this by replacing the typical window frame with its own scheme, while still functioning like a regular window with a close, minimize and restore button, and also with the ability to move.

A long way to do this would be to create a window with the WS_POPUP style and intercept mouse events using collision detection. However, given that Microsoft itself created programs with different GUI styles, it occurred to me that there might be a more standardized way to do this. To be clear, I'm not interested in using third-party APIs like QT or GTK. I want to do this exclusively with the libraries that Microsoft provides. Given these limitations, is there another way to do this?

Answer 1

Take a look at this example of a custom hand-drawn window .

To get the “custom painted window” effect, you need to paint non-client portions of the window using WM_NCPAINT .

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