Skinning (BitBlt Introduction)

Introduction

Do you like the look of those fancy apps like Winamp or Media Player? The ones with stylish interfaces, lots of special effects and generally look downright cool? Is your new killer app dying for a makeover? If the answer is yes then you need to skin your app. Skinning your app can go from easy to dreadfully difficult depending on how far you want to distance your app from normal windows controls.

You might think as a VB developer, VB isn't powerfull enough to run an app and skin it at the same time, but with the help of the API it can. To begin with we're going to make a form that gets cover with a 'skin' onto which you could add buttons, while this isn't the perfect kinning method it's a start and a nice introduction to the GDI (Graphics Device Interface) API.

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About the author

Marc Pritchard

Marc Pritchard United States

Apart from my school work I put most of my effort into running my joke site, I'd like to think that it makes someone smile each day. For about 1/2 a year I've been programming more and more in s...

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