“Windows XP introduced Visual Styles as a mechanism for providing more visual appeal to windows and controls. Menus, however, were not rendered using visual styles for Windows XP. With Windows Vista menus now are part of the visual schema and are rendered using the visual styles engine.”
What horrific looking code.
It’s C code ya nitwit…it all looks like that. Use C# or another HLL if it bothers you.
Mind you the blue text on charcoal background is pretty painful to look at.
Looking at the code remembers me the horrible times of Win32 API (though the code is really that) and MFC.
“It’s C code ya nitwit…it all looks like that.”
That is not true!
You can code using beautiful C++ frameworks and your code will look better, more elegant and less cryptic than that (Qt comes to my mind).
Unfortunately it’s not just because it’s C code. It’s C++ code calling into COM, which never looks that great. COM is great for a component like WIC, which has to be high-performance and callable from both native and managed code (for some reason, I know quite a bit about WIC), but there is a reason why .NET exists: it’s just so much prettier and easier to code for than COM.
The joys of not having a single unified menuing system.
“The joys of not having a single unified menuing system.”
FYI, there is a unified way to add icons on both KDE and Gnome menus. Google earth uses it.
Does any mainstream OS have that?
The joys of not making menu items widgets…
Menu Icons are the one thing I can not stand in Vista, it’s amongst probably my biggest hates.
Everything in Vista is bigger, the menus are bigger in places, why? Because they’ve decided to add pretty little Icons beside some of the text.
What purpose does it really serve, I mean really serve.
If someone is on the phone to tech service, they aren’t going to tell you to to click the little icon that looks like a shield, and is yellow, blue and red.
They are going to tell you the text to click on.
Without the menus in XP, most people’s brains remembered the place in the menu, whether it was down the bottom or up the top, moved to the rough section then looked for the text, no icons are needed.
It just adds unwanted space to the menus, making them twice as high to accommodate Icons.
A 1280×1024 screen res in Vista, looks like 1024×768 in XP with the size of menus and taskbars to me.
Reading that code made little sense. Explain it to me slowly, in VB.NET.
Add icons to the menu control!
Icons in menus! Whatever will Microsoft innovate next?
I was under the impression that Microsoft was moving away from *standard* menus altogether, and would only keep supporting them for legacy apps.
As of Office97, Office hasn’t used standard menus; the menus are just command bars (and thus allow icons, detachment, docking to any edge of the window, etc). Of course, Office2k7 gets rid of menus altogether. And the menus supplied in .NET 2.0 WinForms aren’t standard OS menus either, but custom menu “strips” (that are specialized toolbars), that allow icons, different fonts, text entry boxes (as opposed to simple menu items), and whatnot. I don’t know what WPF menus look like (if there is such a thing).
I guess it’s cool that they’re still supporting *standard* menus, and enhancing them as well.
I guess COM is still alive and kicking too (I was surprised to see a CoCreateInstance call wrt menu functionality :p).
I don’t know what WPF menus look like (if there is such a thing).
WPF does contain a Menu control, but, like most WPF controls, it’s look and behavior depends on the style you apply to it.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745283.aspx