How to draw a custom caption bar like the yahoo messenger 11

Question

As you can see, Y! messenger 11 have used some techniques to draw a beautiful caption bar. Its window's like normal windows in the Win 7 but have a special caption. Is this a glass frame? How can i create one like this??

Bulimia

A lot of interesting resources at this related question that I asked a while ago: #3823109 – Antilogarithm

Yes, this techniques is called drawing on glass – Breadstuff

Answer 1

The best reference I know for this is a series of articles by renowned Delphi expert Chris Rolliston.

• Setting up a custom title bar on Vista/Windows 7
• Setting up a custom title bar – reprise

Divergence

Found these too. An awful lot of work for this purpose, although the code is available with the article. – Incitement

There's a lot of work involved in supporting an XP/Win2003 compatible fallback mode. If I read the articles linked above correctly, Chris didn't fully implement that logic. For a sample that fully implements it, check out the VCL Ribbon source code, which does implement custom non-client painting both in DWM on mode on windows 7 , and DWM off mode, as well as on Windows XP. – Antilogarithm