bits and bytes

Having trouble with tab control pages’  gray background while using XP themes? Well to solve this problem we need to do some additional housekeeping(AFAIK)…

Add a message map entry for WM_CTLCOLOR…

BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP(CTabPage, CDialog)
     ON_WM_CTLCOLOR()
END_MESSAGE_MAP()

Override OnCtlColor and add following code…

HBRUSH CTabPage::OnCtlColor( CDC* pDC_i, CWnd* pWnd_i, UINT uCntrlType_i )
{ 

   // First do default always
   HBRUSH hBrTemp = CDialog::OnCtlColor( pDC_i, pWnd_i, uCntrlType_i ); 

   // If we have a static control or a dialog control we should return our brush
   // with the DC having a transparent background
   switch( uCntrlType_i )
   {
      case CTLCOLOR_STATIC:
      case CTLCOLOR_DLG:
          pDC_i->SetBkMode( TRANSPARENT ); // Transparent mode
          hBrTemp = GetSysColorBrush( IsAppThemed() ? COLOR_WINDOW : COLOR_BTNFACE ); // Our brush
   } 

   // Return brush to caller
   return hBrTemp;
}

Note that we don’t need to delete the created brush since we are using a system cached brush. Also it’s good that you create a custom class(something like CTabPage, make this new class derive from CDialog.) and add this code there and then derive all your tab pages from this class instead of CDialog.