Delphi Cookbook - Second Edition

Making an owner draw control aware of the VCL styles

Owner draw controls are powerful. They allow you to completely tune your GUI for the needs of your users and potentially enable your application to display data in a more familiar way. In the end, owner draw controls improve the user experience with your application. However, owner draw controls do not always fit well with the VCL custom styles. Why? Because if you try to draw something by yourself, you could be tempted to use a "fixed" color, such clRed or clYellow, or you could be tempted to use the operating system color, such as clBtnFace or clWindow. Doing so, your owner draw controls will be not style aware and will be drawn in the same way regardless of the current VCL style. In this ...