101 Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Applications

Application #38. Use Owner-Drawn Menus

This sample application demonstrates how to create an owner-drawn menu. An owner-drawn menu is one where you, as the programmer, override the default drawing behavior of a menu to add some sort of custom font or graphical effect. Specifically, this sample application creates an owner-drawn menu that displays an icon. To do this, a custom control is created, inheriting from the MenuItem control. Many newer applications, such as Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft Office XP, display icons in their menus. By incorporating into your programs owner-drawn menus that display icons, your applications will have a more polished and professional look. The sample application shown in Figure 4-15 displays icons ...